Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library

On October 2, 1780, Major John André was executed as a spy on George Washington’s orders. The British officer had convinced American general  Benedict Arnold to switch allegiances, but having been caught in the act, André was condemned to die a spy's death. He was hung from the gallows like a common criminal, having been denied the honor of facing a firing squad, like an officer and a gentleman. H...

Dr. Nadine Zimmerli recently joined The University of Virginia Press as its editor of History and Social Sciences books. A former editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture , Zimmerli is a historian of 20th century Europe by training. She is also a native of Germany, having grown up in East Germany in the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In this episode, D...

We’re off this week for the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ll be back next week with conversations featuring some of the leading lights in early American history. But we didn’t want to leave you holding the short end of the wishbone. So we put together a short history lesson for you about George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.  Be sure to read the full proclamation and Professor T. K. Br...

If you know anything about Rachel Jackson, chances are you know her best as Andrew Jackson’s wife. You might also know that Rachel died in late 1828, just before Andrew became president.  During Andrew’s presidential campaigns in 1824 and 1828, his political enemies attacked Rachel as an adulterer. Legally speaking, she was. In the early 1790s, Rachel and Andrew learned that her first husband, Lew...

In the Declaration of Independence , Thomas Jefferson criticized George III for "Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us" in the years before the American Revolution. To hear Jefferson tell it, quartered troops had long been a problem in early America. In this episode, Dr. John McCurdy of Eastern Michigan University reveals how the history of accommodating troops in North America is more...

How has technology changed the way that historians and educators tell stories about the past? What does it mean to do "digital history" and how can one get started?  On today's episode, Dr. Loren Moulds of the University of Virginia Law Library sits down with Jim Ambuske to explore how technology is enhancing our ability to interpret the past. A historian of 20th century America, Moulds's work on...

Historians spend a lot of time thinking about audience. Whether speaking at academic meetings, talking with the general public, or teaching students, we consider how we can best communicate our ideas to different groups.  So how do we write the history of Early America for a much younger crowd? In a world full of hungry caterpillars and pigeons eager to drive city buses, how do we communicate the...

Maps do more than visualize landscapes, identify political borders, or chart rivers and oceans. They show us the many and varied ways that we make sense of the world around us. How then, did Early Americans make sense of their world through maps?  Mapping a Nation: Shaping the Early American Republic offers one answer. It is an exhibit currently on display at the American Philosophical Society (AP...

The word “impeachment” is in the air these days. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a website to find information about what the Constitution’s framers thought about impeachment or any other Constitutional issue. Well, The Constitutional Sources Project is the place for you. The project, called ConSource for short, is a Washington, D.C.-based initiative to digitize and transcribe the documents that sha...

What comes to mind when you think about Congress in the nineteenth century? Perhaps you imagine great orators like Henry Clay or Daniel Webster declaiming on the important issues then facing the republic. And yes, in 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks attacked Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. But Congress generally was model of solemnity, right? Well, y...

On today’s show, veteran journalist and biographer Harlow Giles Unger talks to Jim Ambuske about revolutionary radical Thomas Paine , one of his predecessors in the newspaper business. He is the author of the new book, Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence . It is the latest in a long line of Unger biographies about the founding generation. Unger reveals a fascinating charact...

Imagine you lived in the year 1793. The United States has recently suffered its worst military defeat in its history at the hands of the Miami-Shawnee Confederacy. The French Revolution has turned horrifically violent and France is now at war with most of Europe. And both the British and the French are pressuring the United States to choose a side.  Now imagine that you are one of the American, Eu...

In this episode of Conversations at the Washington Library , Samantha Snyder speaks to Jim Ambuske about the life of Elizabeth Willing Powel . Powel was a prominent Philadelphian who became close to the Washington family. Although her loyalties were unclear in the early years of the American War for Independence, she eventually embraced the Revolution. Powel was at the center of Philadelphia polit...

You may know him as Robert E. Lee’s father, but Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was so much more. Born into a Virginia dynasty, the man who would become one of George Washington ’s protégés came of age with the American Revolution itself. Lee was a graduate of Princeton University, a cavalry commander in the war’s brutal southern theater, and he later served two terms as Virginia’s governor. He was...

On July 4, 1791, fifteen years after Americans declared independence, two men walked into a Virginia field. Only one walked out alive. John Crane, the son of an elite Virginia family, killed a man named Abraham Vanhorn after the two exchanged some heated words. Crane was arrested in the name of the law, but two decades earlier he would have been detained in the name of the king. Why does this chan...

In the fall of 1789, George Washington ordered a printed copy of the Constitution along with the laws passed by the First Federal Congress. A book binder bound the printed sheets in leather and added the words "President of the United States" to the front cover. Washington referred to the volume as the "Acts of Congress." Inside, he made a few short marginal notations next to key passages in the C...

We all know Alexander Hamilton for his service during the Revolutionary War, his tenure as the first Secretary of the Treasury, and his death at the hands of Aaron Burr. But have you met Alexander Hamilton, Attorney at Law? In Part 2 of our four-part exploration of early American law, Dr. Kate Elizabeth Brown of Western Kentucky University introduces us to a man who was as ferocious in the court r...

In what ways did the United States remain bound to Great Britain in the decades after American Independence? As it turns out, the law and legal ideas served as a connection between Americans and their former British brethren. In today's episode we talk to Dr. Nicola Phillips of Royal Hollway, University of London, about the life and career of Thomas Erskine. The Scottish-born Erskine was a member...

How did a George Washington letter find a home Scotland? In this episode of Conversations at the Washington Library , Jim Ambuske talks with Rachel Hosker, deputy head of special collections and archives manager at the University Edinburgh Library about a document that connects Washington to Adam Ferguson , one of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Recorded in Edinburgh at the librar...

In this episode, Jim Ambuske chats with LTC Matthew Kutilek, USMC, a 2001 graduate of The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. Kutilek is a United States Marine Special Operations Officer with 18+ years of active duty service with multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is this year's featured speaker at Mount Vernon's Purple Heart Commemoration Day on August 10th. In this podcas...

In this episode, Jim Ambuske sits down with first year Ph. D. student Jordan Pellerito of the University of Missouri who is interning this summer at the Washington Library. Pellerito tells us about her Master’s degree work on the Marquis de Lafayette and how she is spending her summer working with the Library’s collection of Rare Books while researching early U.S. Chambers of Commerce. About our G...

In this episode, Dr. Jim Ambuske continues his conversation with the Washington Library's Research Historian Mary V. Thompson to discuss her new book, "The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret": George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon . Listen to Part 1 here . About Our Guest: Mary V. Thompson is a long-time (38 year) member of the staff at Mount Vernon, where she is n...

In this episode Dr Jim Ambuske sits down with the Washington Librarys Research Historian Mary V Thompson to discuss her new book The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret George Washington Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. About Our Guest: Mary V. Thompson is a long-time (38 year) member of the staff at Mount Vernon, where she is now the Research Historian. She is the author of  In...

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 joins Jim Ambuske to discuss how ideas about educ...

In this episode, Dr. Kevin Butterfield sits down with Dr. Jim Ambuske the Washington Library's new Digital Historian and future podcast host. About Our Guest: Jim Ambuske, Ph. D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former F...