King’s to Present Presidential Symposium in October
On October 5 and 6, a number of important speakers will visit the King’s campus for an event called “Six Presidents in 30 Hours: A Presidential Symposium.”
NEW YORK CITY – July 15, 2015 – On October 5 and 6, a number of important speakers will visit the King’s campus for an event called “Six Presidents in 30 Hours: A Presidential Symposium.” The speakers include Harold Holzer on Abraham Lincoln, Evan Thomas on Richard Nixon, Charles Slack on John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Amity Shlaes on Calvin Coolidge, and David Davenport on Herbert Hoover. All events are free and open to the campus community and the public.
All programs in the symposium will be presented in an onstage interview format. The moderator for each interview will be Talmage Boston, a historian and attorney who resides in Dallas, Texas. The edited transcripts of the onstage interviews will be included in Mr. Boston’s upcoming book, Cross-Examining History: A Lawyer Gets Answers About America’s Past From the Experts, to be published by Bright Sky Press (based in Houston) in the late spring of 2016, for which Emmy Award-winning documentarian Ken Burns has written the foreword.
The symposium will begin on October 5 at noon with Harold Holzer’s talk on his book Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion (RSVP). Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, and frequent guest on television, Holzer serves as chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, successor organization to the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), to which he was appointed by President Clinton in 2000, and co-chaired from 2001–2010. President Bush, in turn, awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008.
Later on October 5 at 6:00pm, Evan Thomas will speak on his new book Being Nixon: A Man Divided (RSVP). Thomas became Editor at Large of Newsweek in September 2006. He is the magazine’s lead writer on major news stories and the author of many longer features including Newsweek’s special behind-the-scenes issues on presidential elections and more than a hundred cover stories. Thomas was Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief for ten years (1986-1996).
The following day, at noon on October 6, Charles Slack will speak on his book Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech (RSVP). Slack has published many award-winning books, including Hetty, a biography of the Wall Street pioneer Hetty Green (which won the 2005 Connecticut Book Award for Biography and the Elle Magazine Reader Prize for Biography). Slack also wrote Noble Obsession (based on the life of inventor Charles Goodyear, Noble Obsession was one of the New York Public Library’s 25 best “Books to Remember” in 2002) and Blue Fairways (which was a finalist for the United Sate’s Gold Associations’ International Book Award). Previously, Slack graduated from Harvard and worked as a newspaper reporter in Tennessee and Virginia before he began writing and editing full time.
The symposium will conclude with a joint event with Amity Shlaes and David Davenport at 6:00pm on October 6 (RSVP). Shlaes, who will speak on Calvin Coolidge, is a Presidential Scholar at King’s and the author of four New York Times bestsellers (includingCoolidge, a biography of the president). She chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based in the birthplace of President Coolidge. Ms. Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary.
Davenport will speak on his new book about Herbert Hoover, The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry. Davenport is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in international law and treaties, constitutional federalism, and American politics and law. Davenport is a columnist for Forbes.com and delivers regular radio commentaries on the Salem Radio Network and Townhall.com (where he is a contributing editor). Davenport is the former president of Pepperdine University (1985–2000).
All four events will take place in the City Room on the College’s campus, located at 56 Broadway in lower Manhattan. Tickets are free, but seating is limited, and attendees must RSVP for each event via Eventbrite: Holzer, Thomas, Slack, and Shlaes and Davenport. Each event will also be livestreamed on The King’s College channel for those who cannot attend in person.