Mencken Day 2019 will be observed September 21, 2019.
Please note the date. Breaking with long-standing scheduling, Mencken Day 2019 will be observed a week later than would be expected as the Pratt Library is celebrating the opening of its renovated facilities on September 14 with a ribbon-cutting and an “open house block party.”
When: September 21, 2019
Where: Wheeler Auditorium, Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St
10:30 AM Annual Meeting of The Mencken Society. Speaker: Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, on “Mencken and Anti-Lynching Legislation.”
Mr Olson was graduated with a BA from Yale University in 1975 and undertook graduate study at UCLA, 1976–77. He is author of The Excuse Factory (1997), The Rule of Lawyers (2003), and most recently Schools for Misrule (2011). Mr Olson founded and is the main writer for www.overlawyered.com which is devoted to “chronicling the high cost of our legal system.””
2:00 PM The 2019 Mencken Memorial Lecture will be by Will Englund, former Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.
Mr Englund received his AB in English from Harvard College and his MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 1998 he and Gary Cohn, also of the Sun, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their investigative reporting on the shipbreaking industry. Mr Englund and his wife Kathy Lally were foreign correspondents in Moscow for the Baltimore Sun from 1991–1995 and 1997-2001. He joined the Washington Post in October 2010 and today is the Assignment Editor of the foreign desk. Mr Englund is author of March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution.