2015
JOSEPH J. ELLIS, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783 – 1789
Joseph J. Ellis is one of the country’s leading scholars of American history. The author of eight books, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation, and the National Book Award for American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. A master portraitist and compelling story-teller as well, his essays, book reviews and commentaries appear regularly in national publications and media. He currently teaches in the Leadership Studies program at Williams College.
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2014
ERIC FONER, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of the country’s most prominent and influential historians, specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th-century America. He is the author of an enormous number of praised and prize-winning books and articles; curator and advisor to television series and shows, and to history exhibits at Parks sites, public and private history organizations and museums, and Disney World and Disneyland. His prior book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes for 2011.
2013
Myron Magnet, The Founders at Home The Building of America, 1735-1817
Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal from 1994-2006 and currently its editor-at-large, is a winner of the National Humanities Medal and a former member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine. Magnet has also written for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, the American Spectator, The New York Times, and other publications. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs. The Founders at Home offers lively biographies of several iconic Founders – including our own John Jay – and explores the connection between their homes and domestic lives, and the country they were building.
2012
Kenneth Jackson, The Resilient Metropolis: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of New York City
Kenneth T. Jackson is the director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History, and Jacques Barzun Professor in History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, and the leading historian of New York City. Prolific author, Editor-in-Chief of the renowned Encyclopedia of New York City and the exhaustive Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, he is past President of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the New-York Historical Society; he is the winner of virtually every important history prize in the country.
2011
DANIEL OKRENT, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent has been a book editor, magazine founder and editor. He was the first public editor of the New York Times; the most-talking talking head in Ken Burns’s Baseball; and the director of Time’s internet efforts in the late 1990s. In addition to Last Call, he is the author of Great Fortune: the Epic of Rockefeller Center; Nine Innings; and The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now; and co-author of Baseball Anecdotes. He is the inventor of Rotisserie Baseball.
2010
EMILY KERNAN RAFFERTY, The Met and Museums: Mainstream in a Morphing World
Emily Kernan Rafferty is President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first woman to hold that top position. As chief administrative officer for the nation’s largest and most comprehensive art museum, she is responsible for supervising more than 2,500 museum employees in such areas as development, membership, technology and information services, human resources, merchandising, communications, legal affairs, government relations, finance, security, and construction. A frequent speaker on topics related to non-profit management, Ms. Rafferty has long been actively affiliated with a number of arts and inter-museum organizations, including Art Table where she has been a member since 1990. She currently serves as a member of the board of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the chairwoman of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism and marketing agency.
2009
HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., Who’s Your Daddy? Genetics and Genealogy in American and African American History
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., practices as an historian, editor, anthologist, critic, essayist, memoirist, genealogist, journalist, publisher and documentarian. Educated at Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, he has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke and Harvard. He has received 50 honorary degrees from institutions around the world, and earned honors and grants from such organizations as the MacArthur Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Wired Magazine. He has received the National Humanities Medal, and delivered the Jefferson Lecture, for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His recent explorations are of genetics and genealogy, and how new tools for research in those fields enhance our understanding of American and African American history. His most recent documentaries are Oprah’s Roots: An African American Lives Special (PBS, February, 2007, with a companion book also in 2007), African American Lives II (PBS, February, 2008) and Looking for Lincoln (PBS, February, 2009). He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled Black Letters and the Enlightenment.
2008
LUCIA STANTON, Roads to Freedom from Jefferson’s Monticello
Lucia Stanton, known as Cinder, is the Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello, responsible for their advanced research and writing projects. She speaks frequently, and has published widely, on topics including slavery, agriculture, science and travel in the time of Jefferson. As the author of Slavery at Monticello and Free Some Day: the African-American Families of Monticello, she has added immeasurably to the detail and nuance in the accounts of the lives and contributions of the African-Americans on that plantation. She also directs the Getting Word oral history project, interviewing descendants of the Monticello enslaved community. She will discuss life at Monticello, focusing on several enslaved families – including the well-known Hemingses – and she will share some of her current work tracing their descendants, who include Civil War officers, suffragists, and civil rights leaders.
2006
JUDITH S. KAYE, From Jay to Kaye: Reflections on New York’s First Chief Justice
Judith S. Kaye is the Chief Judge of the State of New York, serving as the Chief Judicial Officer of the State and the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals. Chief Judge Kaye graduated from Barnard College and the New York University School of Law, and engaged in private practice in New York City until her appointment to the Court of Appeals as an Associate Judge in 1983, and her elevation to Chief Judge in 1993. She was the first woman to hold either of those posts. Chief Judge Kaye is the author of numerous publications, particularly articles dealing with legal process, state constitutional law, women in law, professional ethics and problem-solving courts, and has received many awards and honorary degrees.
2005
MARK MALLOCH BROWN, Diplomacy and the Law: What would John Jay Say About Darfur or a Nuclear Iran?
Mark Malloch Brown’s appointment as Cabinet Chief to United Nations Secretary Kofi Annan in January 2005 follows his five years as head of the UN Development Program, overseeing a reform effort widely recognized as creating a more focused and effective UNDP across the 166 countries where it works. Previously in senior positions with the World Bank, the Sawyer-Miller Group (through which he advised Corazon Aquino, among other world leaders) and as a journalist for The Economist, Malloch Brown is a veteran of global affairs. Time Magazine included him in its 2005 list of “The People Who Influence Our Lives,” noting that his “trademark has been to combine a sharp reading of political forces and public opinion with the substance of public policy.”
2004
COKIE ROBERTS, Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation
Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News where for fifteen years she has covered Congress, politics and public policy. She also serves as Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio. In her more than thirty years in broadcasting, Roberts has published widely and won countless awards, including two Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting. Founding Mothers explores the wives, daughters, and other women who influenced the men behind the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.