Biography Episodes

In this episode of Leadership and Legacy, historian and best-selling author Max Boot reflects on the insights he gained while writing the first definitive biography of President Ronald Reagan. From a turbulent childhood to his unlikely rise as a Hollywood leading man, Reagan’s early experiences shaped a leadership style that would eventually carry him to the highest office in the land. Boot explores how Reagan’s willingness to compromise—often overlooked—became a cornerstone of his enduring lega...

In this episode of Leadership and Legacy, historian, professor, and author Zara Anishanslin explores how art became a powerful form of leadership and resistance in London during the American Revolution. Through striking symbolism and emotional imagery, little-known Patriot artists transformed their creative talents into tools of protest, inspiration, and even espionage, revealing how art shaped the fight for independence in unexpected ways. Tune in for new insights into the hidden power of art, ...

In this episode of Leadership and Legacy, historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dr. Megan Kate Nelson illuminates the life and legacy of Little Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne military, political, and diplomatic leader. Drawing from her forthcoming book The Westerners, Nelson explores how Little Wolf embodied leadership values like consensus building, generosity, strategic brilliance, and sacrifice for the greater good—principles deeply rooted in Northern Cheyenne culture. The conversation offers insi...

In this episode of Leadership and Legacy, Jeffrey A. Engel, Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, shares his personal experience with former President George H.W. Bush and the valuable lessons he learned about the presidency—an office for which no one can truly prepare. Engel identifies memory, energy, and empathy as the key traits of an effective leader, while emphasizing that voters should prioritize character and judgement over personality when eval...

To kick off Season 6, we bring you the story of America’s Favorite Fighting Frenchmen. In 1777, the Marquis de Lafayette sailed from France with a commission as a major general in the Continental Army. Unlike many other European soldiers of fortune, Lafayette paid his own way and had no expectation that he would be placed at the head of American forces. We best remember Lafayette for his service in the American Revolution, his close relationship with George Washington, and the key to the B...

If you pull any decent history book off your shelf right now, odds are that it’s filled with quotes from letters, diaries, or account books that help the author tell her story and provide the evidence for her interpretation of the past. It’s almost always the case that the quotation you read in a book is just one snippet of a much longer document. Perhaps, for example, Catharine Greene’s letters to her husband Nathanael offer the reader insight into some aspect of the family business she was run...

In the eighteenth century, death stalked early Americans like a predator hunting its prey. In Virginia, as in other colonies, death made children orphans and wives widows, making a precarious existence all that much more challenging. For the Virginia elite, death also created opportunities for widows and widowers alike to protect their interests, their property, and their social standing through advantageous re-marriages. But the predator’s teeth never dulled, and when it took another life some ...

Maryland wasn’t so merry for some Americans during the Revolutionary War, especially if you happened to side with the king. Professing fealty to the Crown, for whatever reason or motivation, cost many Maryland colonists their property, and sometimes their lives. But for other Maryland Loyalists, like enslaved people, loyalism was an opportunity to achieve a different kind of American independence, or to turn ideas about class and patriarchy on their heads. Last week we, began our two-part look...

Virginia was home to many of the most famous rebels like George Washington during the American Revolution, but it was also a den of Tories who remained loyal to the British king. Loyalists in all the colonies rejected what they called “the unnatural rebellion” and resisted Patriot forces as they tried to restore the king’s peace to British America. In Virginia, a civil war raged between white colonists, enslaved people who sought their freedom, and many more who just tried to stay out of the w...

In the early years of the nineteenth century, former Virginia schoolteacher James Ogilvie embarked on a lecture tour that took the United States by storm. Born Scotland, Ogilvie became a renowned orator, packing rooms in urban Philadelphia and rural Kentucky alike. As he crisscrossed the nation, lecturing on topics that spoke to American anxieties about the fate of their young republic, Ogilvie became a major celebrity. Many Americans admired him, some even hated him, as he asked them to look in...

If you pull any decent history book off your shelf right now, odds are that it’s filled with quotes from letters, diaries, or account books that help the author tell her story and provide the evidence for her interpretation of the past. It’s almost always the case that the quotation you read in a book is just one snippet of a much longer document. Perhaps, for example, Catharine Greene’s letters to her husband Nathanael offer the reader insight into some aspect of the family business she was ru...

Conversations at the Washington Library kicks off Season 5 by exploring the life of a radical populist who never met a revolution he didn’t like. Almost unbelievably, Herman Husband participated in some of the most significant events in eighteenth-century America: The Great Awakening; the North Carolina Regulation Movement; The American Revolution; and the Whiskey Rebellion. Husband’s story illuminates the major religious, political, and economic upheavals that reshaped North America in this pe...

This episode originally aired in September 2019. You may know him as Robert E. Lee’s father, but Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was so much more. Born into a Virginia dynasty, the man who would become one of George Washington’s protégés came of age with the American Revolution itself. Lee was a graduate of Princeton University, a cavalry commander in the war’s brutal southern theater, and he later served two terms as Virginia’s governor. He was a dashing figure who romanticized the ancient world...

Season 5 of the podcast drops in a few weeks. In the meantime, we're pleased to offer you Library Executive Director Kevin Butterfield’s recent live stream conversation with Edward J. Larson. Larson is the author of many books, including the subject of today's show, Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. We need your help to make Season 5 of Conversations the best one yet. Please take a moment to complete our listener survey that will help shape the future of the show. You’ll find a l...

Season 5 of Conversations at the Washington Library is just around the corner. Until then, we're happy to bring you Jim Ambuske's recent live stream chat with Dr. Jessica Lowe of the University of Virginia School of Law. Long-time fans of the podcast will recognize Dr. Lowe’s name from an episode Ambuske recorded with her in 2019. Their live stream conversation gave them a chance to go much deeper into the horrid crime at the heart of Lowe's book, Murder in the Shenandoah: Making Law Sovereign ...

Week 3 of our summer hiatus is another opportunity to bring you a fascinating look at early America courtesy of some of our recent live stream programming. On today’s show, we bring you Library Executive Director Kevin Butterfield’s conversation with 2019 George Washington Book Prize winner, Dr. Colin Calloway. Calloway is 1943 Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth University. He won last year’s Book prize for his latest work, The Indian World of George Wash...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Dr. Nadine Zimmerli recently joined The University of Virginia Press as its editor of History and Social Sciences books. A former editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Zimmerli is a historian of 20th century Europe by training. She is also a native of Germany, having grown up in East Germany in the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this episode, Dr. Zimmerli shares with Jim Ambuske what it was like to grow up in East Germany before reunification ...

Historians spend a lot of time thinking about audience. Whether speaking at academic meetings, talking with the general public, or teaching students, we consider how we can best communicate our ideas to different groups. So how do we write the history of Early America for a much younger crowd? In a world full of hungry caterpillars and pigeons eager to drive city buses, how do we communicate the complexity of the past to children? Author David Bruce Smith sits down with Jim Ambuske to discuss ...

On today’s show, veteran journalist and biographer Harlow Giles Unger talks to Jim Ambuske about revolutionary radical Thomas Paine, one of his predecessors in the newspaper business. He is the author of the new book, Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence. It is the latest in a long line of Unger biographies about the founding generation. Unger reveals a fascinating character in Paine, a man who never met a revolution he didn’t like. He also shares with Ambuske about how...