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Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, will speak at the University of Delaware on Wednesday, April 23. His talk, “Eyes in the Skies,” will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Clayton Hall on UD’s Laird Campus, Route 896, north of Newark. Free and open to the public, the talk is part of the Global Agenda Speaker Series, “Spies, Lies and Sneaky Guys.”

Blanton served as the archive’s first director of planning and research in 1986, became deputy director in 1989 and executive director in 1992.

The National Security Archive has organized numerous international conferences bringing together historic personalities to confront, explain and analyze the decisions they have made in international crises such as the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In April 2000, the Archive won U.S. journalism’s George Polk Award and the Los Angeles Times described it as the “world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents.”

Blanton is a graduate of Harvard University, where he was an editor of the independent university daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. He won Harvard’s 1979 Newcomen Prize in history and also received the 1996 American Library Association James Madison Award Citation for “defending the public’s right to know.”

He has written, co-authored and served as contributing author to many books. His articles have appeared in the International Herald-Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Slate, the Wilson Quarterly and many other publications.

Blanton is a founding editorial board member of [freedominfo.org], the virtual network of international freedom of information advocates; and serves on the editorial board of H-DIPLO, the diplomatic history electronic bulletin board. He also is on the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, among other professional activities.

Global Agenda is a program of the University of Delaware’s “American and the Global Community” initiative and is presented in association with the World Affairs Council of Wilmington. For more information, directions and updates, check [www.udel.edu/global] or call (302) 831-2355.

Contact: Amy Pasternack, (302) 831-8749
April 10 2003