Pulitzer Prize Winners To Be Featured At Event On Teaching Jacksonian Democracy In Schools
Student Essay Contest Winners Announced
Contact Jamie Gass, 617-723-2277 ext. 210 or jgass@pioneerinstitute.org
BOSTON – Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians will be among the speakers at “The Age of Jacksonian Democracy: Teaching Antebellum America in Schools,” a Pioneer Institute forum to be held at the 46th Northeast Regional Conference on the Social Studies on Wednesday, April 6th, 8:00-11:00 a.m. at the Sturbridge Host Hotel & Conference Center in Sturbridge, MA.
Update: Watch the Livestream video:
Daniel Walker Howe and David & Jeanne Heidler will deliver keynote addresses at the event. The Heidlers are co-authors or editors of 12 books, including Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire and Henry Clay: The Essential American. They are currently working on a book about the political rise of Andrew Jackson.
Daniel Walker Howe won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. He is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University in England and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The keynotes will be followed by a panel discussion to be moderated by Alan Taylor, who has authored seven books, including The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia: 1772-1832, which was a National Book Award for Nonfiction finalist in 2013 and won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in History. His book William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic won the 1996 Bancroft, Beveridge, and Pulitzer prizes. Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia and an expert on slavery.
The panel will include R. Kent Newmyer and Theda Perdue. Newmyer is a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where he specializes in the political, constitutional, and legal history of the early national period, including the Marshall and Taney Courts. He has authored a number of books and received several awards for teaching, including a Distinguished Alumni Professor, the university’s highest faculty honor.
Theda Perdue has published 16 books and is the Atlanta Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is an expert on the Cherokee Nation and Indian removal and has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians, the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Southern Historical Association.
The panel will also feature two public high school teachers. Laura Honeywood is a History and Political Philosophy teacher at the Academy of the Pacific Rim Public Charter School, who has been active in the Center for Civic Education’s program, We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution. In 2015, her students were runner up state champions and attended the We the People national finals. Carolyn Barrows is a History teacher at the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers, which is part of the Boston Public Schools, and is a coach for her school’s Boston Debate League.
Closing remarks will be delivered by Fred Kaplan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A biographer, literary scholar and historian, he is the author, among other books, of biographies of Thomas Carlyle (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Mark Twain. His Lincoln, the Biography of a Writer, a Lincoln Prize finalist, was published in 2008 and John Quincy Adams, American Visionary in 2014.
Welcoming remarks will be delivered by Pioneer Institute’s Distinguished Senior Fellow in Education and former Massachusetts Senate President Tom Birmingham, who co-authored the commonwealth’s landmark 1993 Education Reform Act. He is a Rhodes Scholar.
President Birmingham will begin the event by awarding the winners of Pioneer’s third annual Frederick Douglass U.S. History Essay Contest for Massachusetts high school students. The contest encouraged students to choose from dozens of Massachusetts entrepreneurs and inventions and develop a clearly organized, well-researched essay drawing on primary and secondary sources that explained the historical impact and significance of the chosen subject matter.
Pioneer Institute received nearly 70 submissions from public, vocational-technical, charter, parochial, and private school students, as well as students schooled at home. Winners were selected by an independent panel of judges, including current and former high school history teachers. The first place prize is $5,000; second place is $2,000; third place is $1,000; and Honorable Mentions are $500 each. In addition, the first place winner’s school will receive $1,000. Judges selected three top prize winners and four honorable mentions.
The first place winner is Avery B. Sherffius of Hopkinton High School for his essay on a gene editing tool known as CRISPR, developed in a Cambridge-based lab, which will significantly impact medicine and agriculture. Second place goes to Sibgha Javaid of the University Park Campus School in Worcester for her essay on the invention of the oral contraceptive pill. And the third place winner is Ryan Hutchins from Bishop Feehan High School in Attleboro for his essay on MIT Professor Charles Draper’s invention of the inertial guidance system, a navigation tool essential to aviation, national security, and space exploration.
The four honorable mentions are: Morgan DiPilla from Wachusett Regional High School, and Katherine O’Malley, Christine Schremp, and Kira Hellard from Bishop Feehan High School.
The event is co-sponsored by The Concord Review, We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies, the Massachusetts Historical Society and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The event is hosted by the Northeast Regional Conference on the Social Studies.
Pioneer supports the full preservation of the Bay State’s nationally recognized current U.S. history curriculum frameworks and passage of the U.S. history MCAS test as a high school graduation requirement for public school students in Massachusetts. This forum is the latest in a series about how critical events in American history are taught in public schools. Earlier forums on topics such as the Founding Era and slavery, Women’s History, the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the history of American business & labor, and the Civil Rights Movement, featured a number of Pulitzer Prize winners.
The event is free and open to the public. To attend, guests may register online. Home viewers may watch a live webcast here.
