Episodes

We're excited to bring you Season 5 of Conversations at the Washington Library in a few short weeks. But in the meantime we’ll keep you entertained as promised. Today, we bring you the audio version of Executive Director Kevin Butterfield’s recent live stream with Dr. T.H. Breen. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of History emeritus at Northwestern University. He has been a leading scholar of colonial America and the Revolution for the past several decades, and long has been intereste...

Summer has arrived and with it the end of Season 4 of Conversations at the Washington Library. But don't despair! While we're busy recording new episodes for Season 5, we'll keep the conversation going by bringing you the audio version of recent and upcoming Washington Library Live Stream Digital Book Talks. In fact, for today’s episode, we bring you Dr. Kevin Butterfield’s recent chat with Dr. Mary Beth Norton about her new book, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution. Norton is Mary Donlon Alger ...

During the American Revolution, the Chesapeake Bay was a pirate’s nest. The men who plied the Bay’s waters had shifting loyalties, competing interests, and a keen sense of how to use the law to legitimize their actions. In fact, they are part of a much richer history of piracy in the Bay. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, pirates were a constant feature of Chesapeake society. They connected the Bay and its communities with the wider Atlantic world, and even to the Indian Oce...

This Friday marks the anniversary of Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the moment on June 19, 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they were freed by Emancipation Proclamation and the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War. It is also known as Freedom Day or Liberation Day. To celebrate, Brenda Parker, Mount Vernon Character Interpreter & African American Interpretation & Special Projects Coordinator, will perform Freedom Skies, a special Live Stream event on Juneteenth ...

In March 1797, newly-inaugurated president John Adams thought he detected a glint of joy in George Washington’s eyes as the aging Virginian stepped off the world stage. Adams told his wife Abigail it was as if Washington was thinking, “I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which of Us will be happiest.” The first president had grown tired of the partisan rancor that plagued his second term and longed to sit under his own vine and fig tree at Mount Vernon in peace. But Washington’s vision of a ...

Note: This episode originally aired on January 30, 2020. In May 1796, Ona Judge, Martha Washington’s enslaved maidservant, freed herself by walking out of the Washington’s Philadelphia home. She had learned that Martha intended to give her away as a wedding present to Elizabeth Parke Custis, her eldest granddaughter. Judge quietly slipped out of the house one evening, boarded a ship, and fled to New Hampshire. She lived there for the rest of her life. Despite their best efforts, the Washingtons...

Virginia is a landscape shaped by slavery and the enslaved communities who labored in bondage on plantations like Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the smaller farms that surrounded these large estates. But in the eighteenth century, Virginia, New York, South Carolina, and other mainland colonies with sizable enslaved populations paled in comparison to the importance, profitably, and human complexity of the Island of Jamaica. Jamaica was the crown jewel of the British Empire in this period. It...

In 1812, Pennsylvania state legislators contemplated something that most Americans would now find completely unimaginable: demolishing Independence Hall in Philadelphia, converting the site to a series of building lots, and using the proceeds to fund construction of a new statehouse in Harrisburg. Fortunately, Philly’s city leaders pushed back against state officials and preserved this historic landmark for future generations, allowing visitors to commune with the ghosts of the Founding Generat...

In November 1800, President John Adams composed a letter to his wife, Abigail, just after he moved into the new White House. He concluded his letter to his “dearest friend” this way: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.” As the quote suggests, God was an ever present force in the life of John Adams and his family, and while they hoped that providence would smile on the U...

On the evening of March 5, 1770, Captain Thomas Preston and a small contingent of British Redcoats under his command fired into a crowd of civilians massing on King Street in Boston, killing several people. Many of us are familiar with Paul Revere’s famous engraving of what he called “the Bloody Massacre,” what we now know as “the Boston Massacre.” But Revere’s depiction of the incident obscures much more than it reveals about the thousands of connections between Bostonians and the British...

In December 1799, George Washington died after a short illness. His body and his legacy quickly became fodder for nineteenth century Americans – free and enslaved – who were struggling to make sense of what it meant to be an American as well as the nation’s identity. Americans across the divide used Washington and his memory to advance various political and economic interests. Some, like Federalists, yoked their political fortunes and their belief in a strong central government to Washington’s...

In 1757, Martha Dandridge Custis paid the artist John Wollaston the handsome sum of 56 pistoles for portraits of her, her husband Daniel Parke Custis, and their children, John and Martha. A pistole was a Spanish gold coin commonly used in the colony at the time. The future Mrs. Martha Washington was among the hundreds of Virginians who had their portraits painted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They used portraiture to depict their wealth and status among the Virgin...

In 1793, the dreaded Yellow Fever swept through Philadelphia. The deadly virus raced through the nation’s capital between August and November, killing at least 5,000 of the city’s inhabitants. Among the multi-racial group of Americans on the front lines of the battle against the disease was Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a key figure in the nation’s early medical establishment. Rush, who was the architect of the reunion between Thomas Jefferson and John Adam...

In May 1865, Union forces captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Irwinville, Georgia as the Civil War neared its end. Davis had led the Confederate States of America since 1861. He was taken to Fortress Monroe in Virginia, clapped in irons, and given a Bible to read as he awaited his fate. He had waged war against the United States as the commander in chief of a rebel force, and the Constitution was clear: This was treason. And treason was punishable by death. On the surface, yo...

There are many things that we take for granted in the modern United States. The president’s cabinet is one of them. Although the cabinet is a prominent fixture of the federal government, and a powerful and essential one at that, it has no foundation in the Constitution. The Framer’s discussed the idea of a cabinet at the Constitutional Convention, but they ultimately rejected it and left it on the cutting room floor. Yet, despite the fact that the cabinet has no Constitutional origin, it d...

Three hundred years ago, timber and turtles were key commodities for English settlers on Barbados and Jamaica. Barbadians sailed northwest to the island of St. Lucia where they harvested timber while Jamaicans headed to the Cayman Islands to take turtles in astounding numbers. Why did they seek these resources hundreds of miles away from their home islands? And what does it have to tell us about how settlers adapted to the environment in the early modern Caribbean? On today’s episode, Dr. Mar...

It's mid-March 2020 and chances are you're listening to this episode from the comfort of your home as you practice social distancing. Over the past few weeks many schools and businesses has suspended public operations and transitioned to an online environment in an effort to help limit the spread of the coronavirus, known as Covid-19. While the Washington Library and Mount Vernon may temporarily be closed to the public as well, that doesn't mean we're not hard at work doing what we can to help ...

Dr. Ron Grim has been a geographer for over 40 years. After receiving his PhD from the University of Maryland, Ron embarked on a career that included stops at the National Archives of the United States, the Library of Congress, and the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. On today’s episode, Ron joins Jim Ambuske to discuss his long career as a geographer working with maps at these prestigious institutions. Geography is the study of humanity’s relationship with the E...

On the morning of November 1, 1755, a devastating earthquake struck the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. The quake leveled buildings, triggered fires, and caused a tsunami that laid waste to the urban landscape. When it was all over, thousands were dead. The Lisbon earthquake was a disaster of epic proportions, so much so that it became the subject of the first major international disaster relief effort. People from around the Atlantic world contributed funds to Lisbon and its inhabitants, includi...

In 1784, Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Shaw set sail on the Empress of China destined for the city of Canton, or Guangzhou, in southern China. Shaw was a Boston native who served under Major General Henry Knox during the War for Independence. He also became one of the founding members of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary, and at times controversial, organization made up of American and French officers who served in the Continental Army during the war. George Washington served as t...

Like many folks around the country, you might have spent the last three evenings watching Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Washington documentary series on the History Channel. Documentaries are a form of public history, which we might define loosely as making historical knowledge available and accessible for the public’s benefit. At Mount Vernon, we think about how to do this work a great deal. How can we create frameworks for public understanding of the past that balances expertise with accessibility?...

When the British defeated the French and their allies in the Seven Years’ War, they acquired vast new territories that expanded British America. Britain’s North America Empire grew to include New Brunswick in Canada, Florida on the southern mainland, and Caribbean Islands like Dominica, among many other places. How would the British meld these spaces – spaces that were religiously and ethnically diverse, characterized by both free and enslaved labor, and fraught with tension between indigenous ...

The modern biography as we know it dates to the eighteenth century when Scottish author and lawyer James Boswell published The Life of Samuel Johnson. Boswell produced an account of the rascally Englishman, a friend of his for more than twenty years, that became a kind of template that future biographers have followed. We've all read our fair share of biographies, especially presidential biographies, to know that they follow a similar structure. This is especially true of biographies of the Ame...

In May 1796, Ona Judge, Martha Washington’s enslaved maidservant, freed herself by walking out of the Washington’s Philadelphia home. She had learned that Martha intended to give her away as a wedding present to Elizabeth Parke Custis, her eldest granddaughter. Judge quietly slipped out of the house one evening, boarded a ship, and fled to New Hampshire. She lived there for the rest of her life. Despite their best efforts, the Washingtons were never able to recapture her. On today’s episode, On...