Beeman Continues "Founders" Series with Focus on Conflicting Ideals of Madison and Henry

Distinguished historian Richard Beeman returns to Washington College on Wednesday, Nov. 7, at 5:30 p.m. to share his insights into how the personalities and contributions of James Madison and Patrick Henry shaped the founding of the nation. This second installment of Beeman’s three-part “Meet the Founders” series takes place in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts. Beeman will bring both men to life as he outlines the struggle between Madison’s federal convictions and Henry’s state’s rights views, a struggle that resonates today. Sponsored by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Beeman is a fellow, the series concludes November 14 with the spotlight on George Washington. It is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Starr Center Web site.

James Madison

Patrick Henry

George Washington Book Prize Celebration Honors 2012 Winner Maya Jasanoff, Nov. 8 and 9

Prize winning author and historian Maya Jasanoff.

Click here to listen to Tom Hall's interview with Maya Jasanoff for the WYPR show Maryland Morning. 

CHESTERTOWN, MD— History, they say, is usually told by the winners. But the winner of the 2012 George Washington Book Prize, author Maya Jasanoff, has uncovered the compelling and often moving stories of men and women who found themselves on the losing side of the American Revolution.

Jasanoff will share stories and insights from her book Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World at this year’s George Washington Book Prize Celebration at Washington College, on Thursday, November 8 and Friday, November 9. All events – which are hosted by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience – are free and open to the public.

The main event, “Making History: A Conversation with Maya Jasanoff,” will take place on Thursday, November 8 at 5:30 p.m. in Decker Theatre, Gibson Center for the Arts, and will be followed by a reception. Guests who arrive early will have an opportunity to enjoy a book signing with the author and a performance by the Maryland Loyalist Battalion, a reenactment group.  The full schedule is as follows:

Thursday, November 8, Gibson Center for the Arts

4:15 p.m. - Book signing 

5:15 p.m. - Salute by the Maryland Loyalist Battalion

5:30 p.m. - “Making History: A Conversation with Maya Jasanoff and Adam Goodheart”

6:30 p.m. - Public Reception

Friday, November 9, The Egg, Center Stage, Hodson Hall Commons

9:30 a.m. - “Authors in the Egg: How Books Are Born.” Washington College students, faculty, and members of the public are invited to an informal conversation with Maya Jasanoff. A light breakfast will be served.

 “Maya Jasanoff vividly tells the stories of individual people swept up in the treacherous – and sometimes fatal – currents of history,” says Adam Goodheart, Director of the Starr Center, who will lead the November 8 conversation. “She brings the past to life by putting readers in the shoes of these characters, from wealthy merchants to African-American slaves.”

Jasanoff received the $50,000 prize at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate Museum and Gardens last June. Sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon, the Washington Book Prize is one of the largest literary prizes in the nation. Given annually for the year’s best book about America’s founding era, it particularly recognizes well-written books that speak to general audiences and contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past. 

In addition to the 2012 Washington Book Prize, Liberty’s Exiles also received the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and was shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize in Nonfiction. “At the heart of this smart, deeply researched and elegantly written history is Jasanoff’s re-creation of the lives of those who emigrated — rich and poor, white, black and in some cases red,” wrote New York Times reviewer Thomas Bender.

Jasanoff, a Professor of History at Harvard University, was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize for her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, which was a book-of-the-year selection in numerous publications, including The Economist, The Observer and The Sunday Times. She has contributed essays to The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Created in 2005 to honor the year’s best book about America’s founding era, the George Washington Book Prize was presented that year to Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton. Subsequent winners have included Stacy Schiff (2006), Annette Gordon-Reed (2009), Richard Beeman (2010), and Pauline Maier (2011).

Washington College’s Starr Center administers the Book Prize, which is co-sponsored with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens.

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 at the College 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 is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization supporting the study and love of American history through a wide range of programs and resources for students, teachers, scholars, and history enthusiasts throughout the nation. Gilder Lehrman creates and works closely with history-focused schools through its Affiliate School Program; organizes teacher seminars and development programs; produces print and digital publications and traveling exhibitions; hosts lectures by eminent historians; administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state and US territory; and offers national book prizes. The Gilder Lehrman website, www.gilderlehrman.org, serves as a gateway to American history online with rich resources for educators designed specifically for K–12 teachers and students.

 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.  A picturesque drive to the southern end of the scenic George Washington Memorial Parkway, Mount Vernon is located just 16 miles from the nation’s capital.  www.MountVernon.org

Scholar Presents Fresh, Intimate Look at the Drama Behind Lincoln's Decision to Free the Slaves

CHESTERTOWN, MD— This month marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s announcing the Emancipation Proclamation. In a much-anticipated new book, historian Louis Masur chronicles the little-known political forces and behind-the-scenes intrigues that shaped – and nearly derailed – the most momentous decision that an American president has ever made.

Masur will share the little-known story of Lincoln’s backstage drama in a free public lecture Thursday, September 27, at Washington College. The talk will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge on the main campus, 300 Washington Avenue, Chestertown, and will be followed by a book signing. It is sponsored by the College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union has just been published by Harvard University Press. The book reveals the political, moral and personal concerns that plagued Abraham Lincoln in the 100 days between September 22, 1862, when he first presented a formal draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, and New Year’s Day 1863, when he signed a much-altered final version of the executive order.

“Masur takes a pivotal moment in time and opens it up like a master watchmaker, revealing the intricate, hidden mechanisms, the tensions and balances, concealed within that turning point of American history,” said Adam Goodheart, the Starr Center’s Hodson Trust-Griswold director. “Lincoln’s Hundred Days is a finely wrought and important book.”           

Masur, who is Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, was previously the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College. His earlier books have covered topics as diverse as capital punishment, baseball’s first World Series and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album. Masur’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.

New Book by Washington College Historian Explores Lincoln's Racial Attitudes, Political Savvy

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? In his compelling new book, Lincoln and Race (Southern Illinois University Press), Washington College history professor Richard Striner weighs the evidence and concludes that, not only was Lincoln free of racial bias, but he also was a political genius willing to deceive his opponents about his racial attitudes in order to further the cause of human rights.

“With lawyerly precision, Richard Striner mines the speeches and writings of our 16th president to make a compelling case for a President Lincoln who, contrary to contemporary belief, had a long and abiding commitment, not just to the end of slavery, but also to equality before the law for all men, whatever the color of their skin,” writes Clay Risen of The New York Times.

The author of five previous books, two of them about Lincoln, Striner has been writing and thinking about the Civil War president since he was a graduate student in history at the University of Maryland in the late 1970s. He says that writing Lincoln and Race gave him a chance to explore in depth one of the themes of his first major work on Lincoln, Father Abraham (Oxford, 2006).

“Was Lincoln, emancipator and champion of liberty, actually a conflicted soul struggling to overcome his own racial prejudice? As I worked my way through the issue in Father Abraham, I thought it quite unlikely for a number of reasons, but most of all because, studying his statecraft and politics, it became clear to me that Lincoln was a moral Machiavellian, an idealist with street smarts,” Striner says.

“Lincoln chose to employ deception a number of times during his White House years, in ways that are easy to document. He had to craft a very careful strategy in order to prevent all sorts of worst-case contingencies, including a white supremacist backlash that would have set back the antislavery cause for God knows how many decades.”

Striner structured Lincoln and Race as a sort of detective yarn, a courtroom drama. He even invokes Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel The Thin Man in his introduction. Assembling the evidence piece by piece, affording all sides of the debate a fair hearing, he has one end in mind: that “any satisfactory theory should make greater sense than the others.”

Striner became fascinated with Lincoln’s statecraft when he was in graduate school, “looking at the past in order to find my own bearings in terms of political philosophy, looking for inspiration. Lincoln struck me powerfully in many ways, not least because of the way he harmonized a great idealism with a very tough realism. Later, when I worked as a grassroots historic preservationist in Washington, I came to appreciate him even more because, trying to summon power to my cause, I realized I was trying at a very low level to do what he did so brilliantly on a grand scale.”

Striner’s habit of mining the past for inspiration has informed his numerous articles, including recent pieces about Lincoln for the popular New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War, and a cover story in The American Scholar in which he urges the administration to consider Lincoln’s strategy of printing greenbacks as a possible cure for contemporary economic woes. His 2011 book, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, examines how Lincoln and five subsequent presidents pushed forward large-scale public projects and policies that made the country great.

Striner is currently working on a book about Woodrow Wilson, who, “unlike Lincoln, was a terrible strategist,” he says. “Wilson was narcissistic and foolish in ways that make him Lincoln’s operational opposite. If democracy is going to work, it demands leadership, and if the world is going to be made better, it will be by people who know how to deliver real results and not just pose on a soapbox demonstrating how perfect they are in their attitudes. That’s nice, but it doesn’t free any slaves.”