Conversations at the Washington Library Archives

A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry

Like several of America’s founding fathers, George Washington was a Freemason. Yet Washington’s ties to the fraternity and the role it played in his life have never been widely researched or understood. In A Deserving Brother, Mark Tabbert presents a complete story of Washington’s known association with Freemasonry. […Learn More]

Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero – The Tragic Life of Robert E. Lee’s Father

Who was “Light-Horse Harry” Lee?

Gallant Revolutionary War hero. Quintessential Virginia cavalryman. George Washington’s trusted subordinate and immortal eulogist. Robert E. Lee’s beloved father. Founding father who shepherded the Constitution through the Virginia Ratifying Convention.

But Light-Horse Harry Lee was also a con man. A beachcomber. Imprisoned for debt. Caught up in sordid squabbles over squalid land deals. Maimed for life by an angry political mob. […Learn More]

Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence

From New York Times bestselling author and Founding Fathers’ biographer Harlow Giles Unger comes the astonishing biography of the man whose pen set America ablaze, inspiring its revolution, and whose ideas about reason and religion continue to try men’s souls. […Learn More]

Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood

When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched, Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. […Learn More]

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain

The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was ‘free’ and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. […Learn More]

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. […Learn More]

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn’t abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. […Learn More]

Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic’s future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools–accessible, elementary education–that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. […Learn More]

Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom

By the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith was not only their religious leader but also the mayor and the commander-in-chief of a militia of some 2,500 men. In less than twenty years, Smith had helped transform the American religious landscape and grown his own political power substantially. […Learn More]

The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution

Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them “all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests. Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman’s The Framers’ Coup narrates how the Framers’ clashing
interests shaped the Constitution–and American history itself. […Learn More]