Quest through the Past: 'Looking for Bijah and Lucy' at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, noted biographer and a professor on the faculty of Dartmouth College, will present "Looking for Bijah and Lucy: The Search for an African-American Family That Moved Into Legend," a discussion of her latest research project and its resulting book, at Washington College's Litrenta Lecture Hall on Tuesday, March 18, at 7:30 p.m. A booksigning will follow the lecture.

Gerzina will be in residence at Washington College from March 17-21 as this year's Frederick Douglass Visiting Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. Her latest book, Mr. and Mrs. Prince, was a labor of love, jointly researched with her husband, Anthony Gerzina, whom she met when they were both students at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont.

Lucy Terry, the first known African-American poet, and her husband Abijah ("Bijah") Prince, were landowners and former slaves who lived 200 years earlier in the same village in Vermont as the Gerzinas, and have gone down in history as remarkable people who fought for their rights in the courts.

Mr. and Mrs. Prince paints a vivid picture of 18th century New England, a frontier society shaped as much by race and color as by economic struggle and the constant threat of war. Both Gerzina and her husband regarded their work on the book as "a life-changing event."

Established through a generous gift from Maurice Meslans and Margaret Holyfield of St. Louis, the annual Frederick Douglass Visiting Fellowship brings to campus an individual engaged in the study or interpretation of African-American history and related fields. Besides providing the recipient an opportunity for a week of focused writing, the fellowship also offers Washington College students exposure to some of today's leading interpreters of African-American culture. During her week in Chestertown, Gerzina will meet with students and faculty and speak to classes about her own work.

Gerzina has a B.A. from Marlboro College, an M.A. from Simmons College, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. She has been a tenured professor at Vassar College and at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is now the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, where she is the first woman ever to chair the English department, and the first African-American woman to chair an Ivy League English department. She is also Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.

Gerzina's first book, Carrington, is the only biography of the Bloomsbury Group figure Dora Carrington, and was made into a 1995 movie starring Emma Thompson. Her second book,Black London (published in the U.K. as Black England), delved deeply into the lives of black people in 18th-century Britain, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Gerzina is the host of the nationally syndicated radio program "The Book Show," on which she conducts weekly interviews with some of the finest writers working today, including Anna Quindlen, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid. She has appeared frequently on British television and radio documentaries.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to "Looking for Bijah and Lucy: The Search for an African-American Family That Moved Into Legend" is free and open to the public.

February 29, 2008

Interactive Video Artist Explores 'Non Unexpected Encounters' at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — Internationally acclaimed artist Alexandra Dementieva will present "Non Unexpected Encounters," a discussion of her cutting-edge, interactive video-based art practice, at Washington College's Litrenta Lecture Hall on Wednesday, March 19, at 6:30 p.m.

The presentation will be moderated by intermedia artist and Washington College Professor of Art Monika Weiss and will be preceded by an informal reception at 6 p.m.

The event is being offered as part of the Shelter Arts Festival, a multi-disciplinary celebration running through March and April.

Born in Moscow and based in Brussels since 1991, Alexandra Dementieva combines high-end technology with everyday elements of culture. Utilizing computers, video projections, sound bands, slides, photography and more, she creates multimedia installations that interact with the viewer. Integrating elements of behavioral psychology and a mélange of historical, cultural and political allusions, her video works create a subjective environment in which the spectator becomes the center of the project.

Dementieva has received numerous awards at major multimedia arts festivals in Spain, Russia, Belgium and France. Her work has appeared in galleries throughout Europe, and one of her video pieces is slated to open soon at the Paradise Theater in New York City.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to "Non Unexpected Encounters" is free and open to the public.

February 29, 2008

Neil Simon's Fools Staged at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — The Washington College Department of Drama will present Neil Simon's Fools at the McLain Atrium in the John S. Toll Science Center on Friday, February 29, at 8 p.m., and on Saturday, March 1, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

For centuries Jewish storytellers helped unite and sustain their people with a vibrant oral tradition, passing on history and heritage through tales. Storytelling was a valued art, and gifted storytellers—be they grandmothers, mothers, rabbis or street vendors—were treasured members of the community.

Fools, which takes place in the isolated Ukrainian village of Kulyenchikov in the late 19th century, is award-winning playwright Neil Simon's comedic tribute to a legendary body of Jewish folklore and tradition.

The upcoming Washington College production of Fools, directed by senior Kevin Reagan, features Jess Blanch, Maggie Farrell, Shaina Garrison, Katie Johnson, Emmy Landskroener, Kelsy Long, James Maguire, Ben Mason, Tony Reisinger and Annabelle Shore.

Admission to Fools is free, but reservations are required; call 410/778-7835 or e-mail drama_tickets@washcoll.edu.

February 22, 2008

Washington College Announces $50,000 Book Prize Finalists

Chestertown, MD — In commemoration of George Washington's birthday, Washington College today announced three finalists for the 2008 George Washington Book Prize.

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 newly announced finalists are Woody Holton'sUnruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang), Jon Latimer's 1812: War with America (Belknap/Harvard), and Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship: A Human History(Viking).

The books are a provocative group: a history of the making of the Constitution in which the Framers seem to be working, not for, but against, ordinary Americans; the War of 1812 as seen from the other side of the Atlantic; and a harrowing re-creation of the slave ships—the floating dungeons that carried millions of men, women, and children to these shores from Africa.

"For more than 200 years, Americans have been engaged in an ongoing—and sometimes contentious—conversation about the meaning and significance of our founding era," said historian 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. "The Washington Prize recognizes books that contribute fresh ideas to that national conversation, and approach American history in new ways."

The winner will be announced at a gala celebration May 29 at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens in Virginia.

Previous winners were Charles Rappleye in 2007 for Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution; Stacy Schiff in 2006 for A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America; and Ron Chernow in 2005 for Alexander Hamilton.

The finalists were selected by a jury of three distinguished historians: Robert L. Middlekauff of the University of California at Berkeley, chair; Elizabeth A. Fenn of Duke University; and Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, director of Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies and professor of history at the University of Virginia.

They reviewed 78 books published last year on the founding period in American history, from about 1760 to 1820—time of the creation and consolidation of the young republic.

The jurors described Woody Holton's book as "a new, important and challenging interpretation of the Constitution." His "unruly Americans" are the ordinary citizens who challenged the Framers and forced them to accept the changes that produced the document we revere.

"Woody Holton has written a book of revision," they wrote, "one part a brief against much conventional scholarship on the Constitution's origins, and one part a reconstruction of the role the people, in particular small farmers, played in its drafting... It will not convince everyone, but it will be recognized as a book that reopens an old argument and makes its own with attention to the empirical sources and with stimulating insights. It should receive a wide reading."

Dr. Holton is associate professor of history at the University of Richmond and author of the award-winning Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia.

Jon Latimer's sixth book is the first military history of the War of 1812 from the British perspective published since the early 19th century. The jury called it "sparkling" and wrote that he "has not only mastered a large body of scholarship, he has made sensitive use of the diaries, letters, and records of people otherwise unknown to written history. Thus it is fair to say that Latimer has given us not only a book impressive for its grand sweep, but also one that recovers the experience of ordinary people engaged in the testing conflict that sometimes brought death, suffering, and triumph. Indeed Latimer's book is altogether satisfying in its perspective, its insights, and its compelling prose."

An Associate Fellow of the Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict at Swansea University in Wales, Latimer has a degree from the University in oceanography and served in the Territorial Army for 16 years.

Marcus Rediker's Slave Ship covers "virtually every aspect of the story of where the slaves were from, how they were captured and imprisoned, transported to slave ships, and their treatment on board," the jurors wrote. "Rediker describes his book as 'painful'; it was surely painful to write. Despite the emotional cost to its author, it is beautifully written. Indeed, the book is, in its use of evidence and determination to expose the bleakness of the slave experience, evocative and moving, and deeply instructive in unsuspected ways."

Rediker is a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the prize-winning author ofThe Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.

The Jurors

Robert L. Middlekauff, chair
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Middlekauff is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialty is the history of the English colonies in America in the 17th and 18th centuries through the American Revolution, and he is probably best known for his prize-winning 1982 book The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford).

He earned his B.A. at the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in history at Yale. In 1972, he won the Bancroft Prize for The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (Oxford) and he is also the author of Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (Yale).

He has spent most of his career at UC Berkeley, where he has been chair of the history department three times, dean of social sciences, and dean and provost of the College of Letters and Science. He has also served as director of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His most recent book is Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (California).

Elizabeth A. Fenn
Duke University

Dr. Fenn is an assistant professor of history at Duke University. Her book Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill and Wang) won numerous prizes and attracted a great deal of attention, both among historians and the general public, when it was published in 2001.

Dr. Fenn earned her B.A. in history at Duke and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale. Pox Americanagrew out of her doctoral thesis, which she wrote after working for a few years as an auto mechanic in Durham, North Carolina. She is also the co-author, with Peter H. Wood, ofNatives and Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770 (North Carolina). Her field of study is early North America, with a focus on epidemic disease, Native American history, and social history.

Her current book project, Encounter at the Heart of the World: The Rise and Fall of the Mandan People, 1738-1838, will examine the spectacular rise and equally spectacular collapse of the Mandan Indians in the first century after European contact.

Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy
University of Virginia
Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies

Dr. O'Shaughnessy is the Saunders Director of Monticello's Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. A British-born scholar of American history, he is the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Pennsylvania). His fields of expertise include Colonial America, the American Revolution, and the British Caribbean.

He earned his B.A., his M.A., and his D.Phil. in history from Oxford University and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was a longtime member of the history faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where he was also department chair. At the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Dr. O'Shaughnessy oversees Monticello's research, education, and archaeology departments; the Jefferson Library; and the editorial staff of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. He is an editor of the Journal of the Early Republic and co-editor of the Jeffersonian America Series at the University of Virginia Press. He is on the advisory board of the University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies and has appeared on the History Channel.

Sponsors of the George Washington Book Prize

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience was founded at Washington College in 2000 to promote new scholarship in American history, culture, and politics. Founded in 1782 in colonial Chestertown, Md., Washington College is the only college George Washington supported personally, donating both his money and his name to the project, and serving on its board.

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 and academic research centers, 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 through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute also conducts awards including the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection and other archives. The Institute maintains two websites, www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.

Since 1860, over 180 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.

For more information on the George Washington Book Prize, visit gwprize.washcoll.edu.

February 22, 2008

From Southeast Asia to Eastern Shore: Cambodian Classics Ensemble Performs at Washington College

Chestertown, MD — The 56th season of the Washington College Concert Series continues with a performance by the Cambodian Classics Ensemble at the Norman James Theatre in William Smith Hall on Sunday, March 2, at 4 p.m.

The Cambodian Classics Ensemble features master musicians and dancers who were trained at Cambodia's Fine Arts University, were leaders of professional ensembles in Cambodia, and have revived their arts in refugee camps and the United States since the late 1970s.

These artists are among the masters who resettled in response to civil war, revolution and economic hardship. Juggling daily survival with preserving their traditions, they are recognized teachers and performers in their community, but they are virtual secrets to their mainstream neighbors.

Khmer music and dance maintain and nurture relationships that keep heaven and earth in equilibrium. Many of the artists tell stories of how they believe that their arts have saved them from seemingly inescapable misfortune and death.

The 2007-2008 Washington College Concert Series will continue with a recital by harpist Elizabeth Hainen at the Norman James Theatre on Saturday, April 26, at 8 p.m.

Tickets ($15 for adults and $5 for youth and students) for each concert can be purchased at the door. For more information, call 410-778-7839.

February 20, 2008

Civil Rights Pioneer, History-Making Senator, and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Honored at Annual Washington's Birthday Convocation

Chestertown, MD — Three individuals who have contributed significantly to the cause of civil rights in America will be honored at Washington College's annual George Washington's Birthday Convocation at the College's Benjamin A. Johnson Lifetime Fitness Center on Friday, February 22, at 3:30 p.m.

Pioneering civil rights activist Gloria Richardson was at the forefront of the influential Cambridge Movement in the early 1960s. Former Senator Birch Bayh was instrumental in drafting the major civil rights legislation of the '60s. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch has chronicled the epic struggles and achievements of the civil rights era. All three will receive honorary degrees at Friday's convocation.

Also being honored are the 2008 Washington College Service Award recipients.

As leader of the African-American struggle for civil rights and economic justice in Cambridge, Maryland, in the early 1960s, Gloria Richardson helped define the course of the 20th-century Civil Rights movement. She was also the first woman to serve as the leader of a major local movement.

The so-called "Cambridge Movement," which lasted between roughly 1962 and 1964, is remembered today as the beginning of an important new chapter in the history of Civil Rights. As one recent historian wrote, "Richardson became the clarion caller who beckoned the state and nation to do what was right... She held true to her faith in a moral cause, her belief in how to achieve results, and her compassion for the alienated."

Born in 1922, Mrs. Richardson grew up in Cambridge, in a leading family in the African-American community there. She attended segregated public schools, and then went to Howard University, where she received a B.A. in sociology in 1942. After working as a civil servant in Washington during the war, she moved back to the Eastern Shore and eventually became involved in civil rights, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to desegregate public accommodations.

Cambridge's black population had exercised the right to vote since 1869, but nearly 100 years later still endured grinding poverty, an unemployment rate twice that of local whites, segregated neighborhoods and schools, and denial of access to the vast majority of the community's public spaces.

In 1962, Mrs. Richardson and other local parents formed the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), organizing sit-ins in movie theatres, restaurants, and other segregated public places. Eventually, however, they also began to target deeper social issues, such as housing, health care, and adequate wages. In the summer of 1962, "Project Eastern Shore" registered new black voters in the region and encouraged political participation after decades of suppression by the white establishment.

When civil strife broke out in Cambridge the following summer, and the National Guard was called in to keep the peace, Mrs. Richardson—as chair of CNAC—walked a difficult and dangerous line, negotiating forcefully with local and state leaders and federal officials while holding together her loyal followers amid heavy pressure, mass arrests, and violent attacks.

After 1964, Mrs. Richardson moved to New York City, where she resides today. She has remained active in civil rights and anti-poverty campaigns, and still, at 85, works in the city's Department for the Aging.

Raised on his family's farm in western Indiana, Birch Bayh was elected to the United States Senate in 1962, arriving in Washington at a moment when America was on the brink of crisis and change—but it was also a moment when, thanks to John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, a spirit of youthfulness, energy and innovation was at the forefront of political life.

Senator Bayh was quickly embraced as a rising star by President Kennedy and then by President Johnson. Despite coming from a state where the Ku Klux Klan was still a force in local politics, he stepped into the vanguard of efforts to secure civil rights for African-Americans, cosponsoring the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Later, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he led the successful efforts to defeat President Nixon's nominations of two segregationist judges—Clement Haynesworth and Harrold Carswell—to the Supreme Court. As a result, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights would eventually honor Senator Bayh with their highest award for "his unyielding dedication to human equality and civil freedom."

Meanwhile, Senator Bayh also won renown as an expert on the U.S. Constitution. After the assassination of President Kennedy, he drafted the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which established the rules for presidential and vice-presidential succession. In the midst of the Vietnam War, he authored the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18—and which, at the stroke of a pen, enfranchised 11 million young Americans, who previously had been considered old enough to die for their country but not old enough to vote for their president.

With its passage, Senator Bayh became the only American since the Founding Fathers to draft more than one Amendment to the Constitution.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch is a nationally renowned authority on the American Civil Rights movement. His trilogy of books, America in the King Years, 1954-1968, is one of the most important works of American history of the past generation. It is a monumental work in every sense, drawing on almost 25 years of intensive research and covering more than 3,000 pages. The final volume, At Canaan's Edge, spanning the years 1965 to 1968, appeared to great acclaim in 2006.

America in the King Years "is not a biography of Dr. King," wrote Anthony Lewis in the New York Times. "It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them.... It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph." The New York Review of Books called the series nothing less than "an American Iliad."

Born in Atlanta in 1947, Mr. Branch grew up following the Civil Rights movement on television and witnessing its reverberations in his own community. After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1968, he worked on voter-registration drives in the Deep South.

A diary that he kept during this time developed into a magazine article for the Washington Monthly and launched his career as a writer. In the years that followed, he served as a staff writer at the Washington Monthly, Harper's, and Esquire. He also has written for a wide variety of other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. He earned a Master's of Public Administration degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

The first volume in the King trilogy, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, appeared in 1988 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Critics' Circle Award for General Nonfiction. Mr. Branch received a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (also known as a "genius grant") in 1991 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.

The George Washington's Birthday Convocation also will serve as the occasion to honor members of the College family with the 2008 Washington College Service Awards. The President's Distinguished Service Award will be presented to Burton Brown, Annie Coleman and Barbara Heck. The President's Medal this year goes to the Summer Days Math and Science Camp, founded by Tracy Davenport. And the 2008 Alumni Service Award will be received by Karen Johnson '68.

A reception will follow the ceremony in the Lifetime Fitness Center.

February 20, 2008

Oral Historian/Radio Host Buckley Joins Washington College's C.V. Starr Center Team

Chestertown, MD — Washington College is pleased to announce that Michael Buckley, an accomplished program/arts administrator, journalist and radio host, is the new Program Manager of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Buckley will develop, orchestrate and publicize the Starr Center's many public programs, as well as create new opportunities for Washington College students.

Buckley has served as founding member and Managing Director of the American Historical Theatre, Public Relations Coordinator of the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival, founder of the Philadelphia Town Meeting, Program Coordinator of the New York Open Center for the Arts and Humanities and co-producer/host of "Chesapeake Songs and Stories" at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

He has worked as an administrator and stage technician for a variety of other institutions, including the Brooklyn Arts Council, Los Angeles Contemporary Music Festival, Cirque du Soleil and the Royal Shakespeare Festival.

He is a frequent contributor to the Annapolis Capital, and gave the keynote address at the Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) conference hosted at Washington College last spring.

For the past 14 years, Buckley has been an acclaimed weekend radio host on WRNR (103.1 FM) in Annapolis. His show, which airs from 7 to 10 a.m. on Sundays, features both an eclectic blend of folk, rock, jazz, classical and world music and Buckley's highly regarded interview series, "Voices of the Chesapeake Bay."

For this series, Buckley crisscrosses the region, interviewing some of its most fascinating residents: farmers, Native Americans, watermen, writers, politicians. (He even interviewed "Little Miss Crustacean" from the Crisfield Crab Derby.)

The show, which also airs on WINX (94.3 FM) in Easton, has been recognized with two Governor's Citations for Community Service and several "Best of Baltimore" awards from the Baltimore City Paper.

Buckley's interviews have been collected in both a boxed set of 10 CDs and a book, Voices of the Chesapeake Bay, which will be published in March.

"I'm thrilled to be coming to Chestertown to work with the students of Washington College," said Buckley, who plans to get undergraduates involved in his radio show, and to mentor those who are interested in oral history.

"Michael Buckley's presence at the Starr Center will open up new ways for students to explore the American experience, especially the rich culture of the Chesapeake region," said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of the Starr Center. "The Center's approach has always been broadly interdisciplinary, and Michael's background in music and the arts exemplifies this."

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.

Washington College is a private, independent liberal arts and sciences college located in historic Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Founded in 1782 under the patronage of George Washington, it was the first college chartered in the new nation.

February 14, 2008