Dr. Roald Tweet: How Rock Island began

Dr. Roald Tweet takes his audience back to "1841, the Year That Rock Island Began."  That's theme of this year's Frieze Lecture Series, a 19-year partnership between the Rock Island Public Library and Augustana College.

Dr. Tweet is a professor emeritus of English and Conrad Bergendoff Professor emeritus in the Humanities at Augustana. His talk includes the story of the controversy that swirled like the waters below Fort Armstrong over the renaming of the community lying in the lee of the Mississippi's greatest limestone island.

Frieze Lecture Series is named for the 1903 library's frieze, an architectural feature which goes all the way around the top of the building and is engraved with the names of writers. The authors carved into the sandstone are Homer, Longfellow, Emerson, Virgil, Hugo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Dante, Hawthorne, Esaias Tegner and George Bancroft.

The late Ruth Evelyn Katz, a library board member, created the series as part of the library's 125th anniversary.

Lectures from previous years are available on the Augustana Frieze Lecture channel.