Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library

Note: This episode originally aired on January 30, 2020. In May 1796, Ona Judge , Martha Washington’s enslaved maidservant, freed herself by walking out of the Washington’s Philadelphia home. She had learned that Martha intended to give her away as a wedding present to Elizabeth Parke Custis , her eldest granddaughter. Judge quietly slipped out of the house one evening, boarded a ship, and fled to...

Virginia is a landscape shaped by slavery and the enslaved communities who labored in bondage on plantations like Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the smaller farms that surrounded these large estates. But in the eighteenth century, Virginia, New York, South Carolina, and other mainland colonies with sizable enslaved populations paled in comparison to the importance, profitably, and human complexity...

In 1812, Pennsylvania state legislators contemplated something that most Americans would now find completely unimaginable: demolishing Independence Hall in Philadelphia, converting the site to a series of building lots, and using the proceeds to fund construction of a new statehouse in Harrisburg. Fortunately, Philly’s city leaders pushed back against state officials and preserved this historic la...

In November 1800, President John Adams composed a letter to his wife, Abigail, just after he moved into the new White House. He concluded his letter to his “dearest friend” this way: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.” As the quote suggests, God was an ever present force i...

On the evening of March 5, 1770, Captain Thomas Preston and a small contingent of British Redcoats under his command fired into a crowd of civilians massing on King Street in Boston, killing several people. Many of us are familiar with Paul Revere’s famous engraving of what he called “the Bloody Massacre,” what we now know as “the Boston Massacre.” But Revere’s depiction of the incident obscures m...

In December 1799, George Washington died after a short illness. His body and his legacy quickly became fodder for nineteenth century Americans – free and enslaved – who were struggling to make sense of what it meant to be an American as well as the nation’s identity. Americans across the divide used Washington and his memory to advance various political and economic interests. Some, like Federalis...

In 1757, Martha Dandridge Custis paid the artist John Wollaston the handsome sum of 56 pistoles for portraits of her, her husband Daniel Parke Custis , and their children , John and Martha. A pistole was a Spanish gold coin commonly used in the colony at the time. The future Mrs. Martha Washington was among the hundreds of Virginians who had their portraits painted over the course of the seventeen...

In 1793, the dreaded Yellow Fever swept through Philadelphia. The deadly virus raced through the nation’s capital between August and November, killing at least 5,000 of the city’s inhabitants. Among the multi-racial group of Americans on the front lines of the battle against the disease was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a key figure in the nation’s early medica...

In May 1865, Union forces captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Irwinville, Georgia as the Civil War neared its end. Davis had led the Confederate States of America since 1861. He was taken to Fortress Monroe in Virginia, clapped in irons, and given a Bible to read as he awaited his fate. He had waged war against the United States as the commander in chief of a rebel force, and the Con...

There are many things that we take for granted in the modern United States. The president’s cabinet is one of them. Although the cabinet is a prominent fixture of the federal government, and a powerful and essential one at that, it has no foundation in the Constitution. The Framer’s discussed the idea of a cabinet at the Constitutional Convention, but they ultimately rejected it and left it on the...

Three hundred years ago, timber and turtles were key commodities for English settlers on Barbados and Jamaica . Barbadians sailed northwest to the island of St. Lucia where they harvested timber while Jamaicans headed to the Cayman Islands to take turtles in astounding numbers. Why did they seek these resources hundreds of miles away from their home islands? And what does it have to tell us about...

It's mid-March 2020 and chances are you're listening to this episode from the comfort of your home as you practice social distancing. Over the past few weeks many schools and businesses has suspended public operations and transitioned to an online environment in an effort to help limit the spread of the coronavirus, known as Covid-19.  While the Washington Library and Mount Vernon may temporarily...

Dr. Ron Grim has been a geographer for over 40 years. After receiving his PhD from the University of Maryland, Ron embarked on a career that included stops at the National Archives of the United States , the Library of Congress , and the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. On today’s episode, Ron joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his long career as a geographer working with...

On the morning of November 1, 1755, a devastating earthquake struck the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. The quake leveled buildings, triggered fires, and caused a tsunami that laid waste to the urban landscape. When it was all over, thousands were dead.  The Lisbon earthquake was a disaster of epic proportions, so much so that it became the subject of the first major international disaster relief ef...

In 1784, Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Shaw set sail on the Empress of China destined for the city of Canton, or Guangzhou, in southern China. Shaw was a Boston native who served under Major General Henry Knox during the War for Independence. He also became one of the founding members of the Society of the Cincinnati , a hereditary, and at times controversial, organization made up of American a...

Like many folks around the country, you might have spent the last three evenings watching Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Washington documentary series on the History Channel. Documentaries are a form of public history, which we might define loosely as making historical knowledge available and accessible for the public’s benefit. At Mount Vernon, we think about how to do this work a great deal. How can we...

When the British defeated the French and their allies in the Seven Years’ War, they acquired vast new territories that expanded British America. Britain’s North America Empire grew to include New Brunswick in Canada, Florida on the southern mainland, and Caribbean Islands like Dominica, among many other places. How would the British meld these spaces – spaces that were religiously and ethnically d...

The modern biography as we know it dates to the eighteenth century when Scottish author and lawyer James Boswell published The Life of Samuel Johnson . Boswell produced an account of the rascally Englishman, a friend of his for more than twenty years, that became a kind of template that future biographers have followed. We've all read our fair share of biographies, especially presidential biograph...

In May 1796, Ona Judge , Martha Washington’s enslaved maidservant, freed herself by walking out of the Washington’s Philadelphia home. She had learned that Martha intended to give her away as a wedding present to Elizabeth Parke Custis , her eldest granddaughter. Judge quietly slipped out of the house one evening, boarded a ship, and fled to New Hampshire. She lived there for the rest of her life....

In late 1777, George Washington’s disappointing performance as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army was a source of growing concern among some army officers and members of Congress. While he had won important victories at Princeton and Trenton months earlier, he had lost New York City, and Philadelphia, and suffered defeats at Brandywine and Germantown. Patriots intended to win the war, not...

When George Washington died in December 1799, it changed Martha Washington’s legal status. Just as she did when she was widowed for the first time in 1757, Martha once again became an independent person in the eyes of the law. She was no longer in the shadow of her husband’s legal identity. So what did this mean for Martha and other unmarried or widowed elite white women who ran businesses powered...

This episode originally aired in June 2019.  Once the United States achieved its independence, how did white Americans expect to educate the new republic's youth? How did questions about education become a flash point in the battle between Federalists and Republicans over the meaning of the American Revolution and the nation's soul? On today's episode, Dr. Mark Boonshoft of Norwich University join...

Early Americans like George Washington obsessed over genealogy. Much was at stake. One's place on the family tree could mean the difference between inheriting a plantation like Mount Vernon and its enslaved community, or working a patch of hardscrabble. Genealogy was very much a matter of custom, culture, and law, which explains in part why Washington composed a long-ignored document tracing his o...

The podcast team is off for the holidays. We'll be back in the new year with new thought-provoking interviews with the likes of Jeanette Patrick, Karin Wulf, and Max Edelson. In the meantime, be sure to check out our full back catalog featuring conversations with historians, teachers, prize-winning authors, game designers, and much more. From all of us at the Washington Library, we wish you Happy...

What does the American Revolution look like from a British vantage point? How does that change the way we think about the origins of the United States, and major figures such as George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , or George III? And in the new republic, how did Jefferson try to keep the revolution alive through his ideas on education. On today’s episode, Dr. Andrew O’Shaughnessy helps us explor...