Leadership and Legacy: Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library

In 1757, Benjamin Franklin returned to London after an over thirty-year absence. He first ventured to the imperial capital in 1724 to continue his education as a printer; he went back in the late 1750s as a politician, after being named the London agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly. Franklin took up residence at 36 Craven Street in London, today just down the way from Charing Cross Station, and right near Trafalgar Square. For nearly two decades, with a short return to Philadelphia in between, Franklin lived on Craven Street as he tried to advance colonial interests in the mother country.  On today’s episode, Dr. Márcia Balisciano joins Jim Ambuske from London to explore the Craven Street House that Franklin made a home. Dr. Balisciano is the Founding Director of the Benjamin Franklin House in London, the world’s only remaining Franklin home.  And as you’ll hear, the historic site not only connects us to Franklin and his life, but to the era of the English Civil War in the 1640s, and to eighteenth-century secrets buried in the basement.  Be sure to stay tuned after the chat to hear our first listener voice message. We’ll feature your comments and questions on the show from time to time. Find out how you can submit one later in the program.  About Our Guest: Dr. Márcia Balisciano is Founding Director of the Benjamin Franklin House in London. She holds a Ph.D. in Economic History from The London School of Economics and Political Science. In addition to her duties at Franklin House, she is also Global Head of Corporate Responsibility at RELX, a multi-national information, analytics, and events company, and serves as Chair of the United Nations Global Compact Network in the UK.   About Our Host:  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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

Consuls are essential to American foreign relations. Although they may not be as flashy or as powerful as an Ambassador like Thomas Jefferson or John Quincy Adams, they’re often the goto people when an American gets in trouble abroad or when a trade deal needs to get done. Consuls operate in cities and towns throughout the world, helping to advance American interests and maintain good relations with their host countries, all while helping you replace your lost passport. Much has changed about the consular service since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a consul could earn fees for his services, such as getting you out of a scrape with the local authorities But as today’s guests demonstrates, consuls were and are the backbone of American diplomacy. Dr. Abby Mullen joins Jim Ambuske to discuss her work on American consuls in the early Republic and her podcast, Consolation Prize, a show dedicated to telling the stories of these consuls, and the wider world in which they lived. Mullen is Term Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University where she is also one of the key members of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. About Our Guest: Abby Mullen holds a PhD in history from Northeastern University (2017). Her dissertation, "Good Neighbourhood with All: Conflict and Cooperation in the First Barbary War, 1801-1805," investigates how the U.S. Navy forged international connections in the Mediterranean during the First Barbary War.Mullen is the PI on Tropy, a Mellon Foundation-funded software development project. She is also technical lead on All the Appalachian Trails, a project to create an interactive map of the history of the Appalachian Trail over the last 100 years. Mullen teaches digital history courses at George Mason University About Our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin and other early Americans likened themselves to a rising people who were creating something new under the sun. It’s fair to say that historians have a similar mindset: we’re constantly striving to uncover new evidence, make new arguments, and offer new interpretations that help us better explain the past. So on today’s show, we’re going to introduce you to just a few among a rising generation of historians who are doing cutting edge work in early American history. Recently, the Washington Library partnered with the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a live stream featuring four young historians working on projects ranging from land speculation, capitalism, gender, and law in the late eighteenth century to morale in the Continental Army and soldiering in the American Revolution, to the creation of the archives that shaped how American citizens interrogated the Revolutionary Era. We bring you the audio version of the livestream today, featuring historians Alexi Garrett, Michael Blaakman, Derek O’Leary, and Krysten Blackstone in conversation with Jim Ambuske, Kevin Butterfield, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy. About Our Guests:  Alexi Garrett, Ph.D., examines how elite, unmarried white women (legally classified as feme soles) commercially related to the people they enslaved, and how they managed slave-manned enterprises in Virginia. Dr. Garrett completed her dissertation in 2020 under Dr. Alan Taylor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. She was a 2020 Research Fellow at the ICJS and a 2019-2020 Research Fellow at the Washington Library. She is currently the Institute of Thomas Paine Studies and University of Virginia Press Post-Doctoral Fellow at Iona College. She is from Iowa City and received her B.A. from St. Olaf College. Michael A. Blaakman, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on the American Revolution as well as the history of early American frontiers and borderlands. Educated at the College of William & Mary and Yale University, Blaakman was the Amanda and Greg Gregory Fellow at Mount Vernon in 2015 and is currently the Fritz and Claudine Kundrun Open-Rank Fellow at Monticello. Dr. Blaakman’s project, Speculation Nation, unearths the motives and methods of founding-era elites who sought to profit off the future expansion of their young republic and reveals how and why the revolutionary ideal of an “empire of liberty” became rooted in speculative capitalism. Derek O'Leary, Ph.D., finished his degree in the summer of 2020 at the University of California Berkeley, where he wrote an Atlantic history of the emergence of U.S. historical societies and archives in the nineteenth century. He was a 2019-2020 Research Fellow at the Washington Library. He was drawn to George Washington and Mount Vernon by Jared Sparks (1789-1866), the indefatigable collector and editor of Washington's archive in the antebellum U.S. His work examines Sparks' contribution to the broader culture of commemorating Washington in this period. Krysten Blackstone, a native of Northern Maine, is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She was a 2017-2018 Research Fellow at the Washington Library. Her work examines the morale of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, 1775-1783. Her research utilizes soldiers' narratives of the conflict and is primarily concerned with enlisted soldiers. About Our Hosts: Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. (Washington Library) Andrew O'Shaughnessy, Ph.D. (ICJS - Monticello) Kevin Butterfield, Ph.D. (Washington Library)

The Great Dismal Swamp is a remarkable feature of the southern coastal plain. Spanning from Norfolk, Virginia to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the Swamp is now a National Wildlife Refuge home to Bald cypress, black bears, otters, and over 200 species of birds, among many other critters. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the home to the ambitions of planters and businessmen who sought to transform the swamp into a plantation enterprise of rice, timber, and other commodities. It was also home to the enslaved individuals who labored to make those dreams a reality. Yet the natural landscape, combined with the circumstances of the white-owned companies who controlled the Swamp, created opportunities for the enslaved to resist their bondage, and even self-emancipate into the Swamp’s rugged interior. And like the Jamaican Maroons who sought security in the island’s central mountains, some enslaved Virginians found a city of refugee in the Great Dismal Swamp. These acts of resistance were, as today’s guest explains, a form of petit marronage in a region that experienced more continently than change from the colonial era to the eve of the American Civil War. On today’s show, Dr. Marcus P. Nevius joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his new book, City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1765-1856, published by the University of George Press in 2020. Nevius is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island and a 2020 Washington Library Research Fellow. Ambuske caught up with him over Zoom as he was completing some research on the Great Dismal Swamp in the revolutionary era. About Our Guest:  Marcus P. Nevius is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. His scholarship has received the support of a Mellon Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of History and Culture and the support of a research fellowship awarded by the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. He has also published several book reviews in the Journal of African American History. About Our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

In 1783, the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, which confirmed American independence. As part of the treaty negotiations, American and British diplomats had to determine the new nation’s borders. They used maps like John Mitchell’s 1755 work A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America to figure out what separated the United States from what remained of British America in Canada. You can see a digital copy of the Mitchell Map here. In our own time, the U.S. border with Mexico gets all the attention, but in the eighteenth century it was the northern border with Canada that mattered the most. But even though diplomats drew a line dividing a republican nation from a monarchical one, lines on paper mattered little to people on the ground in places like Detroit and Montreal where Americans, Canadians, and native peoples had an incentive to move goods and people freely across the new border.  They were, as today’s guest calls them, Citizens of Convenience, people who frequently shifted their identity from American citizen to British subject and back depending on local circumstances and their own self-interest.  Dr. Lawrence B. A. Hatter joins Jim Ambuske to discuss the politics of the northern border, taking us on a journey from the diplomatic halls of Paris and London to the trading grounds of Detroit, Ontario, and Quebec in the aftermath of the American Revolution.  Hatter is the author of Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2017. He is an Associate Professor of History at Washington State University and a former Research Fellow at the Washington Library.  About Our Guest:   Lawrence B. A. Hatter, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at Washington State University. He is the author of Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border. Dr. Hatter is currently beginning research on two new book projects about the global context of American Empire: Selling Independence: American Overseas Merchant Communities in the Age of Revolution and Entangling Alliances: America and the World from George Washington’s Farewell Address to the War on Terror.  About Our Host:  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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

With another American presidential election behind us, talk will inevitably turn to the economy and how the president will handle it. That begs a series of questions as we turn our thoughts back to the eighteenth century: How did early Americans think about the marketplace and the economy? How did they believe that were supposed to function? How were the butcher, the baker, the candle stick maker, and their aristocratic overlords supposed to relate to one another in the marketplace? And how did early settlers map older European ideas about the economy and the public good onto the North American landscape. On today’s episode, Dr. Emma Hart joins Jim Ambuske to chat about how we might ask and answer these questions. Hart is the author of the new book, Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019. She is currently Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, but she will soon begin her tenure as Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hart helps us to understand how early Americans participated in the marketplace and the origins of our own capitalistic society. And we’ll get to hear a preview of what she has in mind for the McNeil Center. About Our Guest:  Emma Hart, Ph.D. is a historian of early America and the Atlantic world from 1500-1800.  She is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St. Andrews and is the incoming Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in cities, economic life, and the everyday experiences of the people who lived in Britain's North American colonies and their independent successors. She is the author of two books, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (2009) and Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (2019).  About Our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

What is a legacy? As the artist Lin-Manual Miranda tells us, it’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. American presidents, regardless of party, spend a great deal of time during their presidencies and after they leave office thinking about their own legacies, and how people will study and remember their administrations. Whether the 2020 presidential election results in a second term for President Trump or an inaugural one for a President Biden, both men and the people in their administrations are or will be thinking about what to plant in those gardens. Today’s show builds on this week’s virtual George Washington Symposium at the Washington Library, which is dedicated to consequential elections in American presidential history. On the podcast, we explore one aspect of how modern presidents and their administrations preserve records and memories of the past through oral history. Dr. Evan D. McCormick joins Jim Ambuske today to talk about the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics or (INCITE). McCormick is an Associate Research Scholar with the project, and Columbia was chosen by the Obama Foundation in 2019 to oversee the oral history initiative. McCormick is also a historian of the United States and the World, and he is completing a book on Ronald Reagan’s policies toward Latin America. Ambuske and McCormick dive into the significance of conducting oral histories for preserving and interpreting the legacy of modern presidents, the shape of the Obama Project, and the contrasts between the kinds of sources that historians of early and modern America use to reconstruct the past. About Our Guest:  Evan D McCormick an associate research scholar at Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) where he works on the Obama Presidency Oral History project. Evan is an historian of the United States and the world, and is completing a book on Ronald Reagan's policies toward Latin America. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia (2015) and an M.A. in International Relations from Yale University (2007). He has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2007-2009, he was a policy fellow at the Department of Homeland Security, spanning both the Bush and Obama administrations. About Our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

In 1784, British men went to the polls. It was a pivotal contest in the aftermath of the American Revolution, following a slew of prime ministers who had tried and failed to form governments that satisfied the British electorate, and King George III. British women played a critical role in this election, even though they could not vote. They canvased for votes according to very specific social customs, and accessorized their clothing and bodies to signal support for their respective candidates. They wore muffs, passed out cockades and ribbons, and plied the electorate with beer. And when women slipped outside the bounds of those gendered customs, as the Duchess of Devonshire was alleged to have done, women were accused of electioneering rage. On today’s episode, Dr. Kelly Fleming joins Jim Ambuske to discuss how electioneering rage shaped eighteenth-century British literature. Fleming is a literary scholar and historian who is the Monticello College Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is currently completing a book entitled, Ornaments of Influence: Fashion Accessories and the Work of Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. It’s a study that explores the tension and anxiety in British literature about women’s participation in British politics during the long eighteenth century. Fleming looks at a wide array of fashion accessories like muffs, cockades, and even ostrich feathers, which were procured through the trans-Saharan slave trade and served as a symbol of royal authority. Ambuske and Fleming begin their conversation by learning how literary scholars unpack novels and read them for evidence. They also look at what it means to do a close reading of a novel like Henry Fielding’s 1749 book, Tom Jones, before diving into Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth’s 1801 novel, Belinda, a work inspired in part by Edgeworth’s disdain for women who failed to follow social norms. About Our Guest:  Kelly Fleming is a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She recently earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. Her research explores relationships between gender, material culture, politics, law, and empire in British literature from the long eighteenth century. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Burney Journal. She is working on her book project tentatively titled, Ornaments of Influence: Fashion Accessories and the Work of Politics in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. About our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

Elections that Shaped the American Presidency To learn more and to register, please visit: www.mountvernon.org/gwsymposium As our nation approaches its next presidential election, the 2020 George Washington Symposium focuses on several pivotal contests throughout American history that shaped and defined the election process and the American Presidency. Each day at noon during the week of October 26-30, we will feature a LIVE conversation with an eminent scholar to explore elections during Washington’s lifetime and key elections that followed, including those from the Civil War era, the depths of the Great Depression, and the volatile mid-twentieth century. Monday: Running for Office before the Revolution: George Washington’s First Elections with David O. Stewart Tuesday: America’s First Presidential Elections, from Washington to Jefferson with Jeffrey L. Pasley Wednesday: Lincoln’s Two Elections and the American Civil War with Elizabeth R. Varon Thursday: The Election of 1932: Washington’s Bicentennial and FDR’s Triumph with Donald Ritchie Friday: The Election of 1960 and the Birth of the Modern Campaign with Alan Price

If you pull any decent history book off your shelf right now, odds are that it’s filled with quotes from letters, diaries, or account books that help the author tell her story and provide the evidence for her interpretation of the past. It’s almost always the case that the quotation you read in a book is just one snippet of a much longer document. Perhaps, for example, Catharine Greene’s letters to her husband Nathanael offer the reader insight into some aspect of the family business she was running while Nathanael served in the southern theater of the War of Independence. But what about the rest of the document? What about the quiet moments when someone like Martha Washington asks after a family member, describes the state of their own health, or apologizes for a hurried scrawl, the result of the writer trying to catch the next post? And as valuable as collections like George Washington’s papers are, how can we write more nuanced and complete histories of the American past by reading letters by early American women? On today’s show, we welcome Kathryn Gehred, who is tackling that question by exploring the lives of early American women, one letter at a time. Gehred is a Research Editor at The Washington Papers Project based at the University of Virginia, where she is also on the team at the Center for Digital Editing, which is publishing documentary editions of historical manuscript collections online. Gehred is also the host of the new podcast, Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant. On each episode, Gehred and her guests break down a letter written by early American women and put it in context to show what is often obscured by the so-called juicier quotes you might find in your favorite book. Gehred joins Jim Ambuske today to talk about her podcast, how her training as an early American women’s historian, Monticello tour guide, and documentary editor informs her approach to it, and some of the exciting letters she’s discussed so far. And as a special treat, stick around after the credits role for a preview of Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant featuring Gehred’s conversation with our colleague Samantha Snyder about a letter from Elizabeth Willing Powel to George Washington. About our Guest: Kathryn Gehred is a Research Editor at The Washington Papers Project at the University of Virginia. She is also on the staff of the Center for Digital Editing. A historian of early American women, Gehred is the host of the podcast Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant, a women’s history podcast which showcases the kinds of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. About our Host: 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 Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.