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$10 per talk / $30 for the Spring series
5:30 - 7:30 p.m. on selected evenings
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5:30 - 7:30 p.m. on selected evenings
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“.... knowledge is power, ... knowledge is safety, ... knowledge is happiness”
-Thomas Jefferson to George Ticknor, 1817
Join us this spring for our ongoing "Pursuits of Knowledge” series, featuring programs that explore the past and present to help us think about our modern world. These eclectic offerings include discussions on recent publications, a theatric performance, and a dynamic conversation about the important role that museums play in sharing women’s history. Learn more about each event below, and purchase a series pass to attend each event and save.
Food and beverages, including award-winning Jefferson Vineyards wine, will be available for purchase.
Spring 2025 Pursuits
A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.
Join us as we celebrate Black History Month in a discussion with Dr. Kerri Greenidge about the Grimke sisters. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.
A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.
This program is also part of the Leonard J. Sadosky Memorial Lecture series, an annual event that elevates scholarship through the late Leonard Sadosky. With Leonard's legacy in mind, his friends and family conceived the Sadosky Lecture, which brings an ascendant scholar to Monticello every year to deliver a lecture and engage with the intellectual community here.
Meet the author and book signing available after the program.
About the Author
Dr. Kerri Greenidge is Associate Professor in History, and in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, where she also co-directs the African American Trail Project and Tufts’ Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies Project. Greenidge is the author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (2019). The book received the Mark Lynton Prize in History, the Massachusetts Book Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Award, the Sperber Award from Fordham University, and the Peter J. Gomes Book Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Greenidge's most recent book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family (2022) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Award. The Grimkes was a finalist for the 2023 MAAH Stone Book Award, a finalist for the Harriet Tubman Award from the Schomburg Library, and the recipient of the 2023 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. As a public historian, Greenidge serves on the historians’ council for 10 Million Names, and as historical advisor for the Museum of African American History, Boston and Nantucket. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Massachusetts Historical Review, the Radical History Review, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the Guardian.
About the Moderator
Dr. Andrew M. Davenport is the Vice President for Research and Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. He has published academic articles on Ralph Ellison in mid-century New York City, Thomas Jefferson’s death and its legacies, and the influence of Black literature on post-World War II French culture. He has also published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Davenport serves on the Board of Directors of the American Agora Foundation (Lapham’s Quarterly) and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the White House Historical Association Next-Gen Leadership Ambassadors. He earned a B.A. in English from Kenyon College, an M.A. in American Studies from Fairfield University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from Georgetown University.
“The American story contains many stories, some widely known, and many waiting to be shared.”
– Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum
In celebration of Women's History Month, join Anthea Hartig, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Elizabeth Babcock, Director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum in a dynamic conversation about sharing women’s stories across the Smithsonian museum network. They will discuss past and current efforts to elevate the diverse perspectives, contributions, and accomplishments of women throughout history, and their profound impact on the story of America.
About the Speakers
Dr. Elizabeth C. Babcock is the director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, bringing over 20 years of museum leadership experience to the role. A cultural anthropologist and educator with experience in both the nonprofit and corporate sectors, Babcock has deep expertise in public engagement and education strategies, public-private partnerships and organizational development. As founding director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, Babcock will guide the new museum through a transformative period. Established by Congress in December 2020, the museum advances the understanding of women’s contributions and accomplishments throughout U.S. history. Babcock will set the vision for the museum and oversee the acquisition of a founding collection, curation of permanent and temporary exhibitions, and expansion of digital education resources beginning before the museum’s construction.
Babcock most recently served as the first president and CEO of Forever Balboa Park, a new organization building on the work of two prior park organizations that acts as the City of San Diego’s key non-profit partner stewarding Balboa Park. Prior to leading Forever Balboa Park, Babcock served as the chief public engagement officer and Roberts-Wilson Dean of Education at the California Academy of Sciences. Babcock also served as the vice president of education and library collections at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from 2002 to 2010, and as an applied anthropologist in the museum, environmental and technological fields.
Dr. Anthea Hartig is the Elizabeth MacMillan Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the first woman to hold the position since the museum opened in 1964. Hartig oversees 216 employees, a budget over $48 million, and a collection that includes 1.8 million objects and more than three shelf-miles of archives. She officially began her tenure on February 18, 2019.
Currently, Hartig is leading a vibrant new strategic plan to take the museum through the 250th of the United States in 2026 and beyond. It challenges the museum to be the most accessible, inclusive, relevant and sustainable public history institution.
An award-winning public historian and cultural heritage expert, Hartig was the executive director and CEO of the California Historical Society (CHS) in San Francisco prior to joining the Smithsonian. Additionally, she was the director of the Western Region for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, taught undergraduate and graduate courses in US History and Public History, worked for two city governments, served under two California Governors, and has been involved in historic preservation and public history projects since the 1990s. Hartig is a third-generation native of Southern California, where she grew up in the greater Pomona Valley. She earned her doctorate and master’s degrees in history at the University of California, Riverside, her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied as an undergraduate and graduate student at the College of William and Mary. Dedicated to public service and non-profit advocacy, Hartig has served on numerous California State Commissions, task forces, and Boards including the California Preservation Foundation, National Council for Public History and, most recently, the past President of the Organization of American Historians.
About the Moderator
Dr. Jane Kamensky is President and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. A historian of early America and the United States, she earned her BA (1985) and PhD (1993) in history from Yale University. For thirty years, she worked as a professor and higher education leader, most recently as Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Kamensky is the author or editor of numerous books, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others; and the authoritative Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, co-edited with the late Edward G. Gray. Her most recent book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, was published by W.W. Norton in March 2024.
A former Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Kamensky serves as a Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, a member of the National Advisory Council of More Perfect, and as one of the principal investigators on the NEH/Department of Education-funded initiative, Educating for American Democracy, among many other public history roles. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and she is an elected fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians.
About the Museums
The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum expands the story of America through the often-untold accounts and accomplishments of women—individually and collectively—to better understand our past and inspire our future. Through new stories, we all benefit from a deeper historical understanding of our nation. Since the establishment of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum in 2020, the Smithsonian has named a 25-member advisory council and has identified two optimal sites for the museum to be located, which are currently pending congressional approval. In addition, the museum has raised more than $65.5 million dollars to date.
The National Museum of American History’s mission is to empower people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past. The museum holds a wide range of objects that illustrate women's lives, their accomplishments, and contributions to American society and culture. It also houses some of the Smithsonian’s best-known treasures: the Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the words for the National Anthem; the hat worn by President Abraham Lincoln the night he was assassinated; the writing desk used by Thomas Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence; the Woolworth lunch counter that was the site of the 1960 student sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina; and Dorothy’s ruby slippers worn in the movie The Wizard of Oz now on view in the museum’s new “Entertainment Nation”/“Nación del espectáculo” exhibition.
A detailed and compelling examination of how the legal theory of originalism ignores and distorts the very constitutional history from which it derives interpretive authority.
Constitutional originalism stakes law to history. The theory’s core tenet—that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning—has us decide questions of modern constitutional law by consulting the distant constitutional past. Yet originalist engagement with history is often deeply problematic. And now that a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court champion originalism, the task of scrutinizing originalists’ use and abuse of history has never been more urgent.
In this comprehensive and novel critique of originalism, Jonathan Gienapp targets originalists’ unspoken assumptions about the Constitution and its history. Originalists are committed to recovering the Constitution laid down at the American Founding, yet they often assume that the Constitution is fundamentally modern. Rather than recovering the original Constitution, they project their own understandings onto it, assuming that eighteenth-century constitutional thinking was no different than their own. They take for granted what it meant to write a constitution down, what law was, how it worked, and where it came from, and how a constitution’s meaning was fixed. In the process, they erase the Constitution that eighteenth-century Americans in fact created. By understanding how originalism fails, we can better understand the Constitution that we have.
Meet the author and book signing available after the program.
About the Author
Dr. Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Law at Stanford University. He specializes in the constitutional, political, and intellectual history of the American Revolutionary era and his scholarship has focused primarily on the origins and early development of the U.S. Constitution.
His most recent book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), mounts a comprehensive historical critique of the theory of constitutional originalism, now ascendant on the U.S. Supreme Court. It builds from his first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press Belknap, 2018), which explored how understandings of the U.S. Constitution transformed during the decade following its ratification. His next book will explore the forgotten history of the Constitution’s Preamble and what it reveals about constitutional thinking past and present.
Experience the passion and ideals that inspired a revolution and the birth of a new nation through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson and his good friend, fellow revolutionary and political rival, John Adams. Written by Howard Ginsberg and based on his original play, Jefferson & Adams is the moving and powerful dramatization of the remarkable friendship between two presidents of the United States, with the forthright Mrs. Adams always playing a major role.
Playwright Howard Ginsberg draws from their prolific correspondence to tell the story of the turbulent 52-year friendship between Jefferson, Adams, and Adams’ wife Abigail in a poignant stage performance that combines compelling political thought with passionate personal beliefs. The production features Bill Barker as Thomas Jefferson; Sam Goodyear as John Adams; and Abigail Schumann as Abigail Adams.
About the Performers
Veteran historical actor-interpreter Bill Barker is widely recognized as the nation’s foremost interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. After portraying Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years, Barker joined the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello in 2019. Barker began interpreting Jefferson in 1984 — fittingly, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Combining the tools of theater with rigorous historical scholarship, his approach explores Jefferson’s life and times, and how it relates to our world today.
Barker has performed as Jefferson around the country and around the world, at sites including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Palace of Versailles, and more. He has been featured as Jefferson in numerous publications including TIME, People, and Southern Living, and has appeared as Jefferson on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Monticello guests encounter Barker as Mr. Jefferson in regularly-scheduled programming at Monticello. He also contributes to educational outreach efforts, including electronic field trips and livestream programs, and represents Monticello at special events around the country.
Sam Goodyear has portrayed variously James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Rush, Cole Porter, U.S. Grant, and Santa Clause. The figure with whom he most identifies, however, is John Adams, since appearing in the 1995 world premiere production of Jefferson & Adams at the Leatherstocking Theatre Company in Cooperstown, NY. John Adams himself regretted never visiting Monticello, and thus this presentation can be seen as a posthumous wish come true.
Abigail Schumann is a Virginia-based actor and living history performer, and a past recipient of the Women in American History Award, presented by the Daughters of the American Revolution, for her work interpreting women’s lives through performance.
