Local Author Realizes Scholarly Achievement

While a junior at Mount Ida college, Peter OLalor had begun an article for the American Historical Review. Six years later he went on to produce what his professor called, a book academia has waited more than two hundred years for."

Voted Whos Who in American Universities and Colleges by the faculty he also received an Award for Scholarship after completing the Senior Mentor Project. Peter was required to learn historiography before publishing his article, Revolution to Rhetoric: A legacy of an Eighteenth-century Rivalry. Upon completion of the Senior Mentor Project he was encouraged to write a book. His professor, Mr. Lettierri cautioned him that if he was to take the challenge, [he] will find being a scholar the loneliest job in the world... No one is going to want to know about what you are doing or even care... People will tire of hearing about what you are trying to accomplish much less understand the importance... Its going to take at least six years to write and just as long to get it published ... People do not embrace new ideas easily... Once you do publish it though, scholars will come out of the wood work."

Mr. Lettierri continued to be a mentor but he passed away before Peter published The Never Realized Republic: An Analysis of Capitalisms Impact Upon Republican Virtue and the Federal Constitution, (Washington House, Alexandria, Virginia), 2003.

For more than twenty-five years, Peter has worked with people who have mental retardation, mental illness, in hospice, and teaching.