King’s Presents Presidential Symposium
A group of scholars and experts on American presidents spoke to packed-out crowds in the campus City Room, sharing lessons in leadership and history with the King’s community.
NEW YORK CITY – October 14, 2015 – On October 5-7, 2015, The King’s College hosted an event called “Six Presidents in 48 Hours: A Presidential Symposium.” A group of scholars and experts on American presidents spoke to packed-out crowds in the campus City Room, sharing lessons in leadership and history with the King’s community.
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.
On October 5 at noon, Harold Holzer—one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era—spoke on “Lincoln and the Power of the Press.” Holzer is chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2008. A livestream of his talk is available here.
Later that day, Evan Thomas spoke on “Being Nixon: A Man Divided.” Thomas has been an Editor at Large at Newsweek since 2006, and was its Washington bureau chief for a decade. Thomas’s talk is available as a livestream here.
On October 6 at noon, award-winning author Charles Slack spoke on “Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech.” Slack is the author of many books, including Hetty, a biography of Wall Street pioneer Hetty Green, and Noble Obsession, based on the life of inventor Charles Goodyear. The livestream of his talk is available here.
That evening, the symposium featured a joint event, during which Amity Shlaes spoke on Calvin Coolidge and David Davenport spoke on “The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism.” Shlaes, who is author of four New York Times bestsellers, chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and is a Presidential Scholar at King’s. Davenport is counselor to the director and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as a columnist at Forbes.com, and was formerly the president of Pepperdine University. The livestream of their event is available here. The event concluded on the morning of October 7, when Shlaes was further interviewed about Calvin Coolidge.
The event was organized by Talmage Boston, one of the nation’s foremost attorneys. Boston is compiling a book entitled Cross-Examining History, slated to be published in spring of 2016, in which he interviews presidential biographers. Many of the interviews took place at King’s during the symposium.