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 family. 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
Andrew DavenportDr. 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 Dr. Anthea Hartig, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Dr. 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.
Moderated by Dr. Jane Kamensky, President and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
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
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.
Moderated by A.E. Dick Howard, White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
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.
About the Moderator
A.E. Dick Howard is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, he is a graduate of the University of Richmond; received his law degree from the University of Virginia; was the first Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Residence at Rhodes House, Oxford; and clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Prof. Howard was executive director of the commission that wrote Virginia's new Constitution. Twice a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he has been counsel to the General Assembly of Virginia and a consultant to state and federal bodies, including the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. From 1982 - 1986 he served as Counselor to the Governor of Virginia, and chaired Virginia's Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.
Prof. Howard’s many recognitions have included President of the Virginia Academy of Laureates and receiving UVA’s Distinguished Professor Award for excellence in teaching. James Madison University, the University of Richmond, Campbell University, the College of William and Mary, and Wake Forest University have conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
2024 Fall Pursuits
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/
“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.
ORDER THE BOOK ➔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 HuntJocelyn 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.
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.
ORDER THE BOOK ➔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.
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.
ORDER THE BOOK ➔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