THE BALD EAGLE – Exploring the Improbable Journey of America’s Bird with Jack E. Davis

The Mark Twain House & Museum welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack E. Davis to speak about his book THE BALD EAGLE: THE IMPROBABLE JOURNEY OF AMERICA’S BIRD with Matthew Bell, EcoTravel specialist for the Connecticut Audubon Society.

The bald eagle is regal but fearless, a bird you’re not inclined to argue with. For centuries, Americans have celebrated it as “majestic” and “noble,” yet savaged the living bird behind their national symbol as a malicious predator of livestock and, falsely, a snatcher of babies. Taking us from before the nation’s founding through inconceivable resurgences of this enduring all-American species, Jack E. Davis contrasts the age when native peoples lived beside it peacefully with that when others, whether through hunting bounties or DDT pesticides, twice pushed Haliaeetus leucocephalus to the brink of extinction.

Filled with spectacular stories of Founding Fathers, rapacious hunters, heroic bird rescuers, and the lives of bald eagles themselves―monogamous creatures, considered among the animal world’s finest parents―The Bald Eagle is a much-awaited cultural and natural history that demonstrates how this bird’s wondrous journey may provide inspiration today, as we grapple with environmental peril on a larger scale.

LIVE AND IN-PERSON event. Tickets are $5 and can be redeemed at the Museum Store for $5 off a signed copy of THE BALD EAGLE. REGISTER HERE.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jack E. Davis is the author or editor of several books, including The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History, and The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird. His previous book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, a dual biography of the America’s premier wetlands and the woman who led a movement to save it, won the gold medal in nonfiction from the Florida Book Awards.

Davis has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Escape to Create and, while writing The Bald Eagle, was a recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. He has been teaching history at the university level for more than two decades.

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Programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are made possible in part by support from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts, and the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s United Arts Campaign and its Travelers Arts Impact Grant program, with major support from The Travelers Foundation. For more information call 860-247-0998 or visit marktwainhouse.org.