Lindsay Chervinsky
- Link
- Watch lecture here ⟩
- Speaker
- Lindsay Chervinsky
- Lecture date
- March 4th, 2025
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic
Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a historian of the presidency, political culture, and U.S. government institutions. She is executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History, a historian at the White House Historical Association, and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She earned her bachelor of arts in history and political science from George Washington University and completed her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis.
Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book 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. Her third book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic, is an authoritative account of the second president of the United States that shows how John Adams’s leadership and legacy defined the office for those who followed and ensured the survival of the American republic. 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.
Steve Inskeep
- Speaker
- Steve Inskeep
- Lecture date
- April 8th, 2025
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America
Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR’s Morning Edition as well as its morning news podcast Up First. Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Cairo, and Beijing; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for “The Price of African Oil,” on conflict in Nigeria. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Inskeep and NPR’s Michele Norris conducted “The York Project,” groundbreaking conversations about race that received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence.
Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi as well as Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson’s long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.
In his newest book, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, Inskeep illuminates President Abraham Lincoln’s life through 16 encounters, some well known, some obscure, but all imbued with new significance. A compelling and nuanced exploration of Lincoln’s political acumen, Differ We Must illuminates a great politician’s strategy in a country divided — and lessons for our own disorderly present.
Hampton Sides
- Speaker
- Hampton Sides
- Lecture date
- May 13th, 2025
- Time
- 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Title
- The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Hampton Sides is best known for his gripping nonfiction adventure stories set in war or depicting epic expeditions of discovery and exploration. He is the author of the bestselling histories Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, Hellhound on His Trail, In the Kingdom of Ice, and On Desperate Ground.
His latest history, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, was named a Best Book of the Year So Far 2024 by The New York Times Book Review. In his account of Cook’s last journey, Sides both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s.
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and a Yale graduate, Sides is the 2015 Miller Distinguished Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute and an advisory board member of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and the Author’s Guild. He is editor-at-large for Outside and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. He is also a partner of Atalaya Productions, an independent film company that develops nonfiction and historical stories for the screen.
A frequent lecturer, Sides divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Colorado College, where he teaches narrative nonfiction and serves as Journalist in Residence.