ATHENS, Ohio -- Joyce Appleby, one of the United States' foremost historians of the early republic will present a Contemporary History Institute lecture on Thursday, May 8.

The speech, "Congress and War Declarations: What Does it Mean to Silently Amend the Constitution?" is scheduled for 4:10 p.m. in the 1804 Lounge of Baker University Center and is free and open to the public.

Appleby is a professor emerita at UCLA. Throughout her 40-year career, her scholarship has examined the formation of an 'American' political ideology, with particular focus on the connections between the history of ideas and the history of economic institutions, policies and practices.

Her books include "Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s," "Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans," "Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination," "Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England" and a recently published presidential biography of Thomas Jefferson.

Appleby is past president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Society for the History of the Early Republic.