“.... knowledge is power, ... knowledge is safety, ... knowledge is happiness”
-Thomas Jefferson to George Ticknor, 1817
Join us for our ongoing Pursuits of Knowledge series exploring the enduring legacy of curiosity, innovation, and learning inspired by Thomas Jefferson, and the people and paths that created the United States.
Food and beverages, including award-winning Jefferson Vineyards wine, will be available for purchase.
Event Details
- Concessions and seating open at 5:30pm and the program begins promptly at 6pm.
- Meet the author and book signing available after the program.
- Complimentary parking is available at the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center
About the Program
As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this program will reconsider the Revolution through the lens of antislavery thought and action. Professor Christopher Brown, a leading historian of slavery, abolition, and the British Atlantic world, will examine how revolutionary ideals of liberty, natural rights, and human equality intersected—often uneasily—with the institution of slavery.
About the Speaker
Christopher Brown is Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), and co-editor of Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (2006). His scholarship has received major awards in four different fields of study – American History, British History, Atlantic History, and the History of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance. At Columbia he directed the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, served as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, and received university-wide honors for excellence in mentoring M.A. and Ph.D. students. Christopher holds degrees from Yale University and Oxford University. The latter he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
About the Moderator
Dr. Jane Kamensky is President and CEO of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. A leading 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 a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
A former Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and past Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, Kamensky serves as 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.
