The President’s Lecture Series will feature two speakers during the month of March, historian Michael A. Bellesiles and noted feminist, author and social critic Naomi Wolf. Both presentations begin at 8 p.m. in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building auditorium.

As the Distinguished Presidential Lecturer in History, Bellesiles will examine “Samuel Colt and the Origins of American Gun Culture” Thursday, on March 16.

Bellesiles, associate professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta and founder of Emory’s unique Violence Studies Program, will explain how gun culture in the United States was spawned in the 19th century by the self-promotion and salesmanship of Colt.

Bellesiles says Colt may have been the original master showman and salesman who, like P.T. Barnum, manipulated public sensibilities and invented sales techniques that are still in use. Colt created the perception of a need for guns in the minds of urban males, even though crime rates were so low that no urban police force in the country – other than slave patrols in the South – carried anything more deadly than a billy club.

The public seemed indifferent, when not actively hostile, to gun ownership, Bellesiles says. Even hunting was held up to ridicule and was mocked as the play of “insufficiently grown-up boys.” Those who prized hunting followed the British lead in seeing it as a gentleman’s sport. Naomi Wolf, who made headlines recently as a campaign adviser to Vice President Al Gore, will discuss “Ethical Leadership for the 21st Century” on Thursday, March 23.

She serves as president of the board of The Woodhull Institute, an organization that cultivates ethical leadership for the 21st century. Its focus is a fellowship program to teach professional development in business, law, arts and media to young women ages 21-28. Wolf also has worked with Gore’s daughter, Karenna Gore Schiff, on an Internet outreach effort to attract young voters to the presidential campaign.

Wolf’s first book, “The Beauty Myth,” helped her emerge as one of the grande dames of young feminism in 1991. She has also written “Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century” and “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood.” Her next work, “You Walk That Bridge Alone,” a look at mothering, will be published this spring.