Pursuits of Knowledge

Order your copy of Our Ancient Faith

Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. While many books have been written about his temperament, judgment, and steady hand in guiding the country through the Civil War, we know less about Lincoln’s penetrating ideas and beliefs about democracy, which were every bit as important as his character in sustaining him through the crisis.

Allen C. Guelzo, one of America’s foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president’s firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history. He shows how Lincoln’s deep commitment to the balance between majority and minority rule enabled him to stand firm against secession while also committing the Union to reconciliation rather than recrimination in the aftermath of war. In bringing his subject to life as a rigorous and visionary thinker, Guelzo assesses Lincoln’s actions on civil liberties and his views on race, and explains why his vision for the role of government would have made him a pivotal president even if there had been no Civil War. Our Ancient Faith gives us a deeper understanding of this endlessly fascinating man and shows how his ideas are still sharp and relevant more than 150 years later.

About the Author

Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, where he also directs the Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship. He is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. His book on the battle of Gettysburg, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion was a New York Times best seller in 2013. From 2006 to 2012, he was a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s American History series, and has completed other five series for The Teaching Company. His most recent books are Reconstruction: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Robert E. Lee: A Life (Knopf, 2021) which was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of Ten Best Books for 2021. His newest books are Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy and the American Experiment (Knopf, 2024) in February, 2024, followed by Voices from Gettysburg: Letters, Papers, and Memoirs from the Greatest Battle of the Civil War (Kensington Press) in May, 2024.

Website: https://www.allenguelzo.com

André Michaux was one of the most accomplished scientific explorers of North America before Lewis and Clark. His work took him from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay, and it is likely that no contemporary of his had seen as much of the continent. But there is more to his story.

During his decade-long American sojourn, Michaux found himself thrust into the middle of a vast international conspiracy. In 1793, the revolutionary French government conscripted him into its service as a secret agent and tasked him with organizing American frontiersmen to attack Spanish-controlled New Orleans, seize control of Louisiana, and establish an independent republic in the American West. An unexpected figure emerges at the center of the plot: Thomas Jefferson. 

Drawing on sources buried in the vault of the American Philosophical Society, Patrick Spero offers a bona fide page-turner that sheds new light on an incipient American political climate that fostered reckless diplomatic ventures under the guise of scientific exploration, revealing the air of uncertainty and opportunity that pervaded the early republic.

About the Author

Patrick Spero is the incoming chief executive officer of the American Philosophical Society and a scholar of early American history. Dr. Spero is the author of four books on the era of the American Revolution. They are Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (2016), which was named a staff pick by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018), winner of the Philadelphia Athenaeum’s Literary Award and a finalist for the Journal of the American Revolution’s best book of the year, and the forthcoming The Scientist Turned Spy: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793 (2024) and The Other Presidency: Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society (2024). He is also co-editor of The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century (2016), a book that one reviewer said “will surely secure a place in the historiographical pantheon.” In addition to his books, he has published over a dozen articles, essays, and reviews on the era.

Website: http://www.patrickspero.com/

Order your copy of Tanglewood

“Discover the truth that a whole town buried” in Kalela Williams’ young adult fiction offering on Black history and heritage.

Noni Reid has grown up in the shadow of her mother, Dr. Radiance Castine, renowned scholar of Black literature, who is alarmingly perfect at just about everything.

When Dr. Castine takes a job as the president of the prestigious Stonepost College in rural Virginia, Noni is forced to leave her New England home and, most importantly, a prime internship and her friends. She and her mother move into the “big house” on Tangleroot Plantation.

Tangleroot was built by one of Noni’s ancestors, an enslaved man named Cuffee Fortune―who Dr. Castine believes was also the original founder of Stonepost College, and that the school was originally formed for Black students. Dr. Castine spends much of her time trying to piece together enough undeniable truth in order to change the name of the school in Cuffee’s honor―and to force the university to reckon with its own racist past.

Meanwhile, Noni hates everything about her new home, but finds herself morbidly fascinated by the white, slaveholding family who once lived in it. Slowly, she begins to unpeel the layers of sinister history that envelop her Virginia town, her mother’s workplace, her ancestry―and her life story as she knew it. Through it all, she must navigate the ancient prejudices of the citizens in her small town, and ultimately, she finds herself both affirming her mother’s position and her own―but also discovering a secret that changes everything.

Tangleroot was born of extensive research. As Williams shaped the voices in the narrative, she relied on primary sources like letters and diaries. In crafting the setting, Williams visited historic homes and sites and consulted numerous books and online resources. Monticello was one of the sites Williams visited, and profiles of Monticello's enslaved people, held within the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, were important resources as she envisioned the lives of fictional characters in her book. 

About the Author

Kalela Williams is an author, a proud auntie, a cat mama, and a history enthusiast. She is the Director of Virginia Humanities' Virginia Center for the Book, which produces the Virginia Festival of the Book; and she previously worked in literary and historical public programming in Philadelphia for more than a decade. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Kalela now calls the Central Virginia town of Staunton, Virginia, home, where she and her partner run a community arts organization, The Off Center. Tangleroot is Kalela's debut novel.

Website: https://www.kalelawilliams.com/

About the Moderator

Photo by Billy Hunt

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called "a masterly feat" by the New York Times and recommended as #3 on Time Magazine's best fiction books of the year. My Monticello was also winner of the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the Weatherford Award, the Balcones Fiction Prize as well as a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, an LA Times Prize, a Pen/Faulkner Fiction Award and others. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay, and read live by LeVar Burton.

Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her writing appears in Guernica, The Guardian, Joyland, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. A veteran public school art teacher in Virginia for 20 years, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Order your copy of  Making the Presidency

The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges, provoked by enemies foreign and domestic. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm.

Making the Presidency is an authoritative exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic. Through meticulous research and engaging prose, Lindsay Chervinsky illustrates the unique challenges faced by Adams and shows how he shaped the office for his successors. One of the most qualified presidents in American history, he had been a legislator, political theorist, diplomat, minister, and vice president--but he had never held an executive position. Instead, the quixiotic and stubborn Adams would rely on his ideas about executive power, the Constitution, politics, and the state of the world to navigate the hurdles of the position. He defended the presidency from his own often obstructionist cabinet, protected the nation from foreign attacks, and forged trust and dedication to election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power between parties, even though it cost him his political future.

Offering a portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential periods in US history, Making the Presidency is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of the presidency and the creation of political norms and customs at the heart of the American republic.

About the Author

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture, and U.S. government institutions. She is the Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, a historian at the White House Historical Association and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution and the co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. She has been published in the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, The Daily Beast, and many others; she is a regular resource for outlets like CBS News, Face the Nation, CNN, The BBC, Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and CBC News.

Website: https://www.lindsaychervinsky.com/

About the Moderator

Lauren Duval is an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She is historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, specializing in women’s and gender history and the era of the American Revolution. She earned her PhD from American University in Washington, DC. Her first book, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence, will be published by the Omohundro Institute Press in 2025. She has published an award-winning article, “Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780-82,” in the William and Mary Quarterly, as well as contributing chapters to three volumes about the American Revolution: Women Waging War in the American Revolution (UVA 2022), The Revolution at 250 (UVA 2026), and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Revolution.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. From 2024–2026 she is in residence as a Gibson Fellow at the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia.