Join us for a discussion with Virginia Postrel on March 23

The Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy is pleased to present a conversation with author Virginia Postrel as the March installment of its Libertas Virtual Event Series.

The Zoom conversation will be held at 12:30 on Tuesday, March 23, and is sponsored by AT&T, Sig Sauer, and Bank of America.

Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine from 1989-2000, is an author who writes about economics and culture. We’ll be discussing her latest book, “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made The World.”

In The Fabric of Civilization, Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal the surprising economic and cultural impact of something we all take for granted — textiles. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Join us to learn about this fascinating and overlooked history.

Postrel has been a columnist for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. She won the Bastiat Prize for free-market commentary in 2011. We’re very pleased she could join us for this conversation.

Reservations are $25 and can be made on our donation page. (Click on the $25 donation for the Virginia Postrel event.)

If you’d like to reserve a spot for this event, Grover Norquist in April, and our final event in May, you can click on the $60 option and save $15 on the cost of all three events.

Thank you to our sponsors!