Bruce Kuklick can’t remember how he got the audacious idea of applying for a Thouron – the first person in his family to graduate from high school, he commuted to Penn from his blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood and thought of a trip downtown as a dangerous adventure. “It blew me away, seeing the spires of Oxford for the first time.” That naïve youth became an important historian and professor; in 2004 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society, a distinction that has come to very few American scholars. “The Thouron Award changed everything” he says. “It opened my eyes to the world, made me think differently about life; it gave me an enduring international perspective and created lifelong friendships.” Photo by Michael T. Regan.