Pianist Valenti Performs Friday for Washington College Concert Series

CHESTERTOWN—Accomplished Chicago-based pianist Mark Valenti will perform Friday evening, March 4, at 8 o’clock as part of the Washington College Concert Series. His performance will take place in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. The program will include pieces by Aaron Copland and Jon Fisher, along with Debussy’s Estampes and Beethoven’s Sonata no. 28 in A Major, op. 101.

Valenti holds a bachelor of music degree from the Philadelphia Musical Academy and a master of music degree from Northwestern University and has studied with Benjamin Whitten, Zoltan Kocsis and Mary Sauer. Formerly Professor of Music at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Xavier University in Chicago and the Loire Valley Music Institute in France, he now teaches at his private studio in Chicago.

He has soloed in cities throughout the U.S. and has performed in France, Belgium, Hungary and Luxembourg. He also has worked extensively in jazz, including performances with Gregory Hines, Frank Foster and Al Grey. For more: http://www.markvalenti.com/

Tickets, available at the door, are $15 for adults and $5 for youth ages 18 and under. Washington College students are admitted free with a valid ID.

Washington College Announces Finalists for $50,000 George Washington Book Prize

CHESTERTOWN—Washington College has announced the three finalists for the 2011 George Washington Book Prize. President Mitchell B. Reiss revealed the news during the College's annual George Washington's Birthday Convocation held Friday afternoon, February 25.

The honored books include the first comprehensive account of the political contests behind the ratification of the Constitution, a new analysis of the American Revolution, and an illuminating history of the War of 1812. They are Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (Simon & Schuster), Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (Knopf).
The $50,000 award—co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon—is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind. It recognizes the year's best books on the nation's founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.
"The United States was born amid debates and conflicts that engaged not just a few so-called 'Founding Fathers,' but also millions of ordinary men and women," said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, which administers the prize. "Each of this year's finalists captures how Americans participated in the often fractious – and sometimes dangerous – process of creating a new nation."
The winner will be announced at a dinner on May 25 at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens in Virginia.
The finalists were selected by a jury of three distinguished historians: Mary Beth Norton, the Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, who served as chair; David Armitage, the Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University; and Daniel Walker Howe, the Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. They selected the finalists after reviewing 59 books published last year on the founding period in American history, from about 1760 to 1820, the time of the creation and consolidation of the young republic.

Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788, "demonstrates the author's mastery of a subject that has not previously received such sustained treatment, despite its importance," noted the jurors. Maier is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at M.I.T. She is the author of several books and textbooks on American history, including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (W.W. Norton, 1992); The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (Knopf, 1980); and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, (Knopf, 1997), which was on the New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" list of the best 11 books of 1997 and a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award.

In praising Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America, the jury wrote, "One can readily imagine a reader who loves history curling up in bed with Jack Rakove's engaging, accessible, and well-written book," adding that it "imaginatively integrates his narrative of the Revolution and its aftermath with a series of biographical sketches of leading American revolutionaries." Rakove is the W.R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science at Stanford University. He has taught at Colgate University and has been a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law. Rakove won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for History for Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996). He is also the author of The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (revised edition, Addison, Wesley, Longman, 2001); and Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Books, 1997).

Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies is "the most illuminating and original history of the conflict ever written," the jurors wrote. "Taylor's masterly effort to rethink the War of 1812 is strikingly successful in its own terms, as a balanced, superbly grounded, analytically rich, and literarily compelling account of a conflict which, as Taylor says, 'looms small in American memory.' " Alan Taylor teaches American and Canadian history at the University of California, Davis. His books include The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderground of the American Revolution (Knopf, 2006); American Colonies (Viking, 2001); and William Cooper's Town (Knopf, 1996), which won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for American history. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic.
More information about the George Washington Book Prize is at gwprize.washcoll.edu.

The 2011 George Washington Book Prize Jurors

Mary Beth Norton, chair, is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University. Norton's book Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Knopf, 1996) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. She is also the author of The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774—1789 (Little, Brown & Co., 1972); Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750—1800 (Cornell University Press, 1980); and In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Knopf, 2002), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in History and which won the English-Speaking Union's Ambassador Book Award in American Studies. She has received four honorary degrees, and in 1999 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Starr Foundations, and the Henry E. Huntington Library. In 2005-2006, she was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge and Newnham College.
Daniel Walker Howe is a historian of the early national period of American history and specializes in the intellectual and religious history of the United States. He is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University in England and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought (Oxford University Press, 2007). Other books include The Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979) and Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Harvard University Press, 1997.) He has been president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 1989–1990, he was Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford and a Fellow of Queen's College. In 1992, he became a permanent member of the Oxford History Faculty and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford until his retirement in 2002.
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Among his eleven books to date are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context, co-chair of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal for "conspicuously important work ... of a nature that involves communicating with the public," and in 2008, Harvard named him a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for "achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art."

About the Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize

Washington College was founded in 1782, the first institution of higher learning established in the new republic. George Washington was not only a principal donor to the college, but also a member of its original governing board. He received an honorary degree from the college in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency. The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, founded in 2000, is an innovative center for the study of history, culture and politics, and fosters excellence in the art of written history through fellowships, prizes, and student programs. www.washcoll.edu

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state. The Institute also awards the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. The Institute maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.
Since 1860, over 80 million visitors have made George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens the most popular historic home in America. Through thought-provoking tours, entertaining events, and stimulating educational programs on the Estate and in classrooms across the nation, Mount Vernon strives to preserve George Washington's place in history as "First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen." Mount Vernon is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, America's oldest national preservation organization, founded in 1853. www.mountvernon.org.

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Career Diplomat Eagleburger, Educator Invernizzi to Receive Honorary Degrees at Washington College Convocation

CHESTERTOWN—Washington College will award honorary degrees to former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and noted educator Marcia Invernizzi at the annual George Washington’s Birthday Convocation, Friday, February 25. The College also will recognize alumni, staff, and prominent community members for their contributions. President and Mrs. Mitchell Reiss, the Board of Visitors and Governors, and the Alumni Board of Washington College serve as hosts of the annual event, which begins at 3:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts. A reception will follow the ceremony.

An American statesman who climbed the Foreign Service ladder to the highest rank ever achieved by a career diplomat, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger remains one of our country’s leading experts in foreign policy and global diplomatic affairs. Tapped to be the personal aide to Henry Kissinger early in his career, Mr. Eagleburger went on to serve under four U.S. Presidents. After joining the first Bush administration, he was one of the envoys sent to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to help restore relations with the rulers in Beijing.

Eagleburger is known throughout the world for his role during the Gulf War, when he kept the U.S.-led coalition together by persuading the Israeli government to show restraint against Saddam Hussein’s scud missiles. He remains a key adviser on the Middle East and an outspoken figure on the public stage, raising the alarm of nuclear weapon development in North Korea and Iran, as well as concerns over waning U.S. relations with Israel. In his recent assignment as Chairman of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, he oversaw the distribution of more than $300 million in awards to more than 48,000 Holocaust survivors and their heirs. Eagleburger will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws from the College.

Dr. Marcia Invernizzi, a 1972 graduate of Washington College, has devoted her career to understanding how children acquire language and then providing early childhood educators with effective instructional techniques. She is the primary author of four literacy assessments used nationwide and co-author of 10 books, including Words Their Way, a comprehensive look at phonics, spelling and vocabulary development and instruction.

Invernizzi is the Henderson Professor of Reading Education and Director of the McGuffey Reading Center at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. She wrote Virginia’s statewide literacy assessment program and is principal investigator of a $1.6 million grant from the Institute of Educational Sciences to develop a comparable literacy assessment for Spanish-speaking children in the primary grades. As a founder of Book Buddies, a nationally recognized reading tutorial for struggling readers, she continues her campaign to build a nation of readers. Washington College will award her the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

The Alumni Service Award will go to George Buckless, ’69, retired Regional CEO of Lincoln Financial Advisors and a member of the College Board of Visitors and Governors from 1996-2004. One Alumni Service Award is given annually to an alumnus who has given outstanding and continued support to the College. Chosen by the Alumni Board’s Awards Committee, Buckless has dedicated much of his time and talent to the Alumni Council, Hall of Fame Committee, and Stadium Committee. He most recently helped to spearhead the Athey Baseball Park construction as committee chair.

Matthew Mullin, ’97, Chair of Washington College’s Center for Environment, will receive the Alumni Horizon Ribbon Award at the ceremony. This award is given to a graduate from the past 15 years who has demonstrated outstanding leadership, service, or scholarship in a particular area. Mullin has made great strides in the field of environmental consulting from his time as the College’s first environmental studies major. He went on to work for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and in May 2010 joined the Environmental Defense Fund as the Chesapeake Bay Director in the Oceans Program. He also co-chairs the Washington College Annapolis Alumni Chapter.

The President and Chairman of the Community Food Pantry, James Fouss, is this year’s recipient of the President’s Medal, which recognizes an individual or group’s significant contributions to the advancement of the community. Fouss played an integral part in Chestertown’s 300th Anniversary celebration as a committee co-chair and has received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award for Kent County for his dedication to the Chestertown community.

Additional honorees at the George Washington’s Birthday Convocation will receive the President’s Distinguished Service Award for their work on behalf of the College. Associate Professor of Mathematics Louise Amick, faculty secretary Catherine Naundorf, John Toll Professor of Psychology George Spilich, Director of Waterfront Activities John Wagner, and Advancement Office secretary Patsy Will are the 2011 honorees.

In addition, the ceremony will recognize faculty and staff for long-time service to the College, including 44-year veteran of the Drama Department, professor Tim Maloney, who also serves as Director of the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts.
And the Washington College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society, will introduce its 2011 inductees.

Photo: Washington College alumnus Marcia Invernizzi will be honored for her work in education.

Frick Biographer to Share Personal History Behind Great-Grandfather's Famous Art Collection

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Henry Clay Frick, the famous art collector and industrialist, lived a life that combined glittering masterpieces with dark personal demons. In a March 9 presentation at Washington College, sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, Frick’s great-granddaughter, Martha Frick Symington Sanger, will reveal how death and tragedy helped inspire one of the greatest art collections in the world, now enshrined in New York's famous Frick Collection.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 5 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Sanger is the author of the 1998 biography Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait (Abbeville Press), which explores the impact of events in Frick’s personal life on his collecting — especially the tragic 1891 death of his 5-year-old daughter and an attempted assassination of the tycoon the following year. The paintings Frick acquired after 1892, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Ingres, and Vermeer, were notable for recalling people, places, and events from his own past.

At his death, Frick bequeathed the majority of his extensive art collection to the American people, establishing the public gallery now known as the Frick Collection, but his legacy was counterbalanced by his reputation as a strikebreaker and an enemy of the working class.

“Walking into the Frick and exploring the masterpieces there, a casual visitor would never guess at the collection’s deeper, hidden meaning,” said Starr Center director Adam Goodheart. “But thanks to Martha Frick Symington Sanger’s detective work, we know how those paintings form a kind of secret autobiography of their owner.”

Martha Frick Symington Sanger has researched the Frick family for more than twenty years, and is the author of two other books, Helen Clay Frick: Bittersweet Heiress (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) and The Henry Clay Frick Houses: Architecture-Interiors-Landscapes In the Golden Era (Monacelli Press, 2001). She served as a consultant for the 1995 PBS documentary Andrew Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World. In a 2007 article for the Wall Street Journal, Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian cited Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait as one of the best books ever written on America’s Gilded Age philanthropists.

Sanger’s talk, “Henry Clay Frick: Mourning Became the Art Collector,” will juxtapose artistic masterpieces with archival photographs to illustrate how her great-grandfather’s psychological complexities produced one of the world’s greatest art collections.

Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, Washington College is a private, independent college of liberal arts and sciences located in colonial Chestertown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Based in the Custom House along the colonial waterfront, the College’s C.V. Starr Center fosters the art of written history and explores our nation’s past — particularly the legacy of its Founding era — in innovative ways, through educational programs, scholarship and public outreach. For more information on the Center, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

Books-into-Film Event at WC To Screen and Discuss Robert Altman's "Short Cuts"

CHESTERTOWN—Miller Library at Washington College will host three free screenings of Robert Altman’s 1992 film Short Cuts beginning Friday, Feb. 25, and then follow up March 2 with a discussion of the film and the Raymond Carver short stories that inspired it.

The film will be shown Friday, Sunday and Monday, Feb. 25, 27 and 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Norman James Theatre on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

The following Wednesday, March 2, at 5:30 p.m., Christopher Ames, Provost and Dean of the College and a professor in the English Department, will lead a discussion of the book and the film in the Sophie Kerr Room of the College’s Miller Library. He will guide the group in exploring literary and film devices (plot, characterization, setting, etc.) and examining how the subtleties of language in a novel can be reinterpreted through image, music and sound. The discussion will take place in the Sophie Kerr Room of Miller Library.

Altman based his Short Cuts on ten short stories written by Carver. In an unusual twist, those ten stories were later published as a collection and titled Short Cuts. The movie is a fascinating example of cinematic adaptation. Set in Los Angeles, it interweaves the characters from the ten stories into a remarkable performance that won a special Golden Globe award for Best Ensemble Cast and earned Altman an Oscar nomination for Best Director. The cast includes Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand, Jack Lemmon, Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Peter Gallagher, Lyle Lovett, and Tom Waits.

The screening and discussion are part of a statewide Books-to-Film project sponsored by five college libraries and the Maryland Humanities Council through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Friends of Miller Library organization is offering a free copy of the Short Cuts book to the first 25 persons who sign up to participate in the screening and discussion. To sign up, please contact Ruth Shoge at rshoge2@washcoll.edu or 410-778-7292. For more information go to: http://millerlibrary.washcoll.edu.

Photos: Top, Madeleine Stowe and Tim Robbins in a scene from Robert Altman's film Short Cuts. Middle, Washington College dean of faculty Chris Ames, who will lead the literary/cinematic discussion March 2.

New Funding to Enhance Washington College's Crime Mapping, Analysis for State

CHESTERTOWN—The Crime Mapping and Analysis Program (CMAP) at Washington College has received $177,847 in additional funding to expand and enhance the crime mapping and analysis it provides to the State of Maryland.

Part of the College’s Center for Environment and Society, CMAP has produced timely mapping, analysis, and reporting of criminal justice data from a variety of state and local sources since 2008. It works directly with the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention (GOCCP) and also collaborates with local, state, and Federal law enforcement agencies on geospatial analysis and training. The goal is to use the power of computer mapping to reduce violent crime and property crime, making Maryland communities safer places to live.

One of the key initiatives spearheaded by CMAP is the Maryland Offender Management System, or MOMS. This innovative web-based application centralizes justice information and shares it with designated law-enforcement and criminal justice agencies. The new funding will provide a number of technical enhancements to MOMS, increase the ability of the application to handle additional datasets, and improve the security and reliability of the system.

The FBI actively supports the development of intelligence tools such as MOMS “to better protect the citizens of Maryland and Delaware through the integration of law enforcement data,” says James Costigan, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, FBI Baltimore Field Office. “This collaborative leveraging of information results in safer and more synergistic investigative results."

Washington College students also play an important role in CMAP projects. Several highly qualified interns in the Geographic Information Systems lab work on assignments that include crime analysis, map creation, and data-quality improvement projects. All students, staff, and faculty involved with the project must pass state and federal criminal backgrounds checks as part of the security protocols that ensure that sensitive data is not disclosed.

One recent project requested by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services was completed by Tracie Bienemann ’11. The Washington College senior mapped the residential locations of released offenders with drug abuse and mental health concerns, and then compared that data with the current locations of treatment facilities that address addiction and mental-health issues. With Bienemann’s data, the state can evaluate where to target new resources for treating the offenders and, thus, reduce recidivism rates

Pulitzer-Prize Winning Journalist, Photographer Chronicle Working Class America

CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College continues its “New Labor Journalism” series on Monday night, February 28, with a visit from the Pulitzer Prize winning collaborative team of journalist Dale Maharidge and Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson. The event begins at 7 p.m. on the LitHouse porch, 407 Washington Avenue.

Maharidge, who began his journalism career at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, started collaborating with Williamson when they met while on the staff at the Sacramento Bee. Their first book together, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, is a seminal look at the underside of American prosperity. The book inspired Bruce Springsteen, who eventually wrote an afterword to the reprint of the book, to pen two songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad: “The New Timer” and “Youngstown.”

In 1990, Maharidge and Williamson received the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-fiction for And Their Children After Them, a book that re-visits three Alabama tenant share-cropping families fifty years after they became the subjects of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Maharidge and Williamson’s collaborations continued in such recent volumes as Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of American Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (a book students are reading in both an undergraduate and a graduate class at Washington College) and their post-9/11 collection Homeland.

This spring, the University of California Press is releasing a compendium of the multi-decade collaboration between Maharidge and Williamson, Someplace Like America. The publisher describes the book as taking the reader “to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness.”