The Presidents: The Lives Behind the Legends: Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf

Public | Jan, 19 2022 4:00PM - 5:15PM

The Presidents: The Lives Behind the Legends, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf

No figure looms as large in American history as the nation’s president. Our schools and our political traditions teach us that these larger-than-life men – almost mythic in the power and influence they wielded – uniquely embodied their eras and shaped the country’s destiny. But who are the presidents, the flesh-and-blood individuals who rose to the nation’s highest office? What motivated them? How did they achieve their successes and cope with failure? How did their experiences and personalities shape their presidencies? What legacies did they leave behind?

This program will explore such questions through lively discussion with eminent presidential biographers, authors who have delved beyond the pomp and ceremony of the office to uncover the complexities and nuances of presidential lives. Over six weeks, we will learn about towering figures like Thomas Jefferson and John F. Kennedy as well as lesser-known men such as John Tyler and Calvin Coolidge. And we will explore the evolution of the presidency itself, placing our own moment in the long flow of American history.

This series is co-hosted by the LBJ Presidential Library and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at The University of Texas at Austin.
 

Full schedule

January 12: John A. Farrell speaking on Richard Nixon

January 19: Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf speaking on Thomas Jefferson

January 26: Amity Shlaes speaking on Calvin Coolidge

February 2: Fredrik Logevall speaking on John F. Kennedy

February 9: Christopher Leahy speaking on John Tyler

February 16: Alexis Coe speaking on George Washington

 

Format

We will be using a Zoom webinar. Each session will begin with a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence but will allow ample time for questions from the audience.

Registration

Advance registration is required. You only need to register once for the series; you do not need to register for each week’s session. Once you register, you can expect to receive an email with a link to join the event. Questions about registration? Email utolli@austin.utexas.edu.

 

REGISTER NOW TO JOIN US

 

About the speakers

On January 19, 2022, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf will join us to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed has won 16 book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). She is the author of six books and editor of two. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen’s College) 2014-2015, and was appointed an Honorary Fellow at Queen’s in 2021. Gordon-Reed served as the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and is currently president of the Ames Foundation. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the National Humanities Medal. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy.

Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and Senior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (Monticello). A specialist in the history of the early American republic, Onuf was educated at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his A.B. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, and has taught at Columbia University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Southern Methodist University before arriving in Virginia in 1990. In 2008-2009 Onuf was Harmsworth Professor of American History at the University of Oxford; in 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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