In the Hands of the People

Saturday, January 21 | 3:30pm | Auditorium

Jon Meacham, Presidential Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, Author, Historian & Harvard Law Professor
*The Auditorium is filled for this event. Tickets are available for simulcast viewing in the Woman's Club room.*

***The Auditorium is filled for this event. Tickets are available for simulcast viewing in the Woman’s Club room or via Livestream from your home.***

Pulitzer Prize–winning historians Jon Meacham and Annette Gordon Reed offer a collection of inspiring words about how to be a good citizen, from Thomas Jefferson and others; revitalizing how to see an individual’s role in the world, through exploration of Jeffersonian concepts such as religious freedom, the importance of a free press, public education, participation in government, and others. In this conversation, Meacham and Gordon-Reed remind us why our country’s founding principles are still so important today.

About the Speakers

Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham is a renowned presidential historian, contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, contributing editor at TIME, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, Meacham was educated at St. Nicholas School, The McCallie School, and graduated from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature; he was salutatorian and elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Society of American Historians, Meacham is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He is a contributing writer to The New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor of Time, and has written for The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and Garden & Gun. Meacham is also a regular guest on “Morning Joe” and other broadcasts.

A former executive editor at Random House, he published the letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and books by, among others, Al Gore, John Danforth, Clara Bingham, Mary Soames, and Charles Peters. After serving as Managing Editor of Newsweek for eight years, Meacham was the Editor of the magazine from 2006 to 2010. He is a former editor of The Washington Monthly and began his career at The Chattanooga Times. He now lives in Nashville with his wife and children.

Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed 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.

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