Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dr. Alan Taylor will explore the era in which Louisiana became a state when he appears as part of Louisiana Tech University’s “Louisiana@200: A Bicentennial Lecture Series,” commemorating the 200th anniversary of Louisiana statehood in 1812. Taylor will speak on two separate occasions: * “The Slave War of 1812: Runaways and the Royal Navy” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18 at the Lincoln Parish Library and * “Narratives of Freedom and Slavery in the War of 1812,” at 10:30 a.m. Friday, Oct. 19 at Wyly Tower Auditorium. Both events are free and open to the public. A nationally recognized specialist in early American history, Taylor graduated from Colby College and received his Ph.D. in history at Brandeis University.  He currently serves as professor of history at the University of California at Davis. In addition to “William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic,” which received the Pulitzer Prize in United States History in 1995, Taylor is the author of “American Colonies” (2001), “Writing Early American History” (2005), “The Divided Ground: The Northern Borderland of the American Revolution” (2006) and “The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies” (2010), as well as numerous articles in specialized journals. Sponsors of the “Louisiana@200” series at Louisiana Tech are the College of Liberal Arts, the department of history, the department of social sciences, the School of Literature and Language, the department of journalism, the School of Performing Arts, and Phi Alpha Theta and Phi Alpha Delta national honor societies.