UVM History Department Blog

The UVM Department of History is excited to welcome our esteemed colleague, Mr. Calvin Trillin, to campus for his public lecture “The Writing Life” on Wednesday September 27 (5:00, Ira Allan Chapel).  It is true that Mr. Trillin’s brilliant credentials as a historian are often, and inexplicably, overlooked.  But within the field he is revered for such classics as “An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing” (which he figured, wrongly, would be “an easy task compared to, say, a medievalist whose specialty requires him to poke around in thirteenth-century Spain”), “A Very Short History of the Fish Taco,” and of course the methodological tour de force “An Attempt to Compile the Definitive History of Didee’s Restaurant” (“I might have given up the history game right there if it hadn’t been for the baked duck and dirty rice”).  Like all great historians, if somewhat more literally than most, Mr. Trillin evinces an inexhaustible appetite for the evidence.  The talk should be over in time for dinner.