Goodfellow Lecture to Explore the Friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

Chestertown, MD, November 26, 2001 — Washington College and the Goodfellow Lecture Series present "A Curtain of Separation: The Friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams," a lecture by Professor Barbara Oberg of Princeton University. The talk will be held Wednesday, November 28, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. in the College's Miller Library, Sophie Kerr Room. The public is invited to attend.

Oberg (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1974) is a lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton and specializes in eighteenth-century Anglo-American history and the political and intellectual history of the American Revolution and early republic. She is the co-author of Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards and the Representation of American Culture (1993) and Federalists Reconsidered (1998), and she is the general editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson project at Princeton.

With the publication of the recent best-selling biographies of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, how should we look back on these compatriots? What common vision did they share and where did they differ? Has the pendulum swung too far away from Jefferson and has his reputation been undermined in light of recent research? Oberg's lecture will address these questions.

The Guy F. Goodfellow Memorial Lecture Series was established upon Goodfellow's death in 1989 to honor the memory of the history professor who had taught at Washington College for 30 years. The intent of the endowed lecture series is to bring a distinguished historian to campus each year to lecture and spend time with students in emulation of Dr. Goodfellow's vibrant teaching style.