Meg Jacobs, a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and author of the new book, “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s,” will present a public lecture at 4:30 p.m.,  Monday, April 25, 2016, in Bowl 016, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus. A book sale and signing will follow the discussion.

Jacobs’ new book takes an in-depth look at why American politicians failed to devise a long-term energy policy. Jonathan Alter – author of “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies” – states, “Meg Jacobs has written a lively, incisive, and important narrative of how the energy crisis flummoxed presidents and policy-makers of the 1970s and 1980s and eroded the public’s faith in government.”

Jacobs teaches courses in public policy and history at the Woodrow Wilson School. She received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Virginia and previously was an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Business School, the Charles Warren Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

Jacobs is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America,” which was published with Princeton University Press and won the Organization of American Historians’ 2006 prize for the best book on modern politics. Jacobs also co-authored “Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989,” together with Julian E. Zelizer, the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.

Jacobs recently had an op-ed on CNN online: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/21/opinions/when-americans-fought-over-gasoline-opinion-jacobs/index.html