Few Americans think of the nation’s founding father as a writer, or an avid reader. More often than not, we picture George Washington as a vigorous leader astride a horse, commanding an army, or crossing stormy rivers in the cold of night. Kevin Hayes’s prize-winning narrative, George Washington: A Life in Books, dismisses these popular images of Washington as a man of all action and no ideas or learning. By examining Washington’s personal library, his reading notes, and his personal journals, Hayes shows how books influenced the development of Washington’s intellect, his character and leadership skills, and by extension, the development of a new nation.

Hayes, who won the 2018 George Washington Prize, will speak about his book at Washington College on Tuesday, October 23 at 5:15 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall. A book signing will begin at 4:30 p.m. A reception will be held after the talk. Hosted by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, all events are free and open to the public.

The full schedule for the Washington Prize celebration follows:

• 4:30 – 5:00 p.m. Book signing with Kevin Hayes
• 5:15 – 6:15 p.m. “Making History: A Conversation with Kevin Hayes and Adam Goodheart”
• 6:15 p.m. Public reception.

In awarding Hayes the prize, a jury of noted historians praised him for revealing a new side of Washington, by “uncovering an intellectual curiosity that dozens of previous biographers have missed.” Adam Goodheart, the Starr Center’s Hodson Trust Griswold director says: “A Life in Books demonstrates that while Washington never attended college and felt self-conscious about his lack of formal education compared to some of his peers, he was a broadly inquisitive man who found pleasure as well as instruction in books.”

Hayes’s project began with a fellowship that he received in 2008 from Washington College’s Starr Center. The award allowed him to spend a month working with rare volumes at the Boston Athenaeum, which holds a large portion of George Washington’s personal library.

The recipient of numerous research fellowships, Hayes is emeritus professor of English at University of Central Oklahoma. His interests in literature and American history intersect in his publications The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2008) and A Journey through American Literature (2012).As a graduate student at the University of Delaware he studied under Professor J. A. Leo Lemay, a leading scholar of early American literature. Hayes lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio.

The George Washington Prize campus celebration is co-sponsored by Washington College Department of History, American Studies Program, Department of English, Sophie Kerr Committee, and Phi Alpha Theta, the College chapter of the national history honors society.

The $50,000 Washington Prize was awarded to Hayes at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate in May. Sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Mount Vernon, the Washington Prize is one of the largest literary prizes in the nation. Awarded annually for the year’s best written work about America’s founding era, it particularly recognizes works that contribute to a broad public understanding of the American past.

Established in 2005, the George Washington Prize has honored a dozen leading writers on the Revolutionary era including the Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda and Pulitzer Prize winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Alan Taylor.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 35 states and a dozen nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

The ultimate fate of the more than 100 men, women, and children who landed on Roanoke Island in 1587, with the intent to establish a European settlement in the New World, has been one of the greatest mysteries in American history. Within a few years, the settlers vanished, leaving behind a single clue: a secret token etched into a tree.

In his new book, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, author Andrew Lawler sets out to probe our national need to know. His narrative of America’s oldest unsolved mystery and the people racing to unearth its answer exposes sobering truths about race, gender, and immigration, and ultimately, why historical myths matter.

Lawler will present a book talk and signing on Thursday, Oct. 4 at 5:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, Toll Science Center, at Washington College. Sponsored by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the program is free and open to the public.

Colorful characters, past and present, populate Lawler’s account, from English knight Sir Walter Raleigh and the Croatoan Indian, Manteo, to archeologist Ivor Noel Hume and Fred Willard, a “maverick Lost Colony seeker.” Digging deep into the archival and archeological evidence, Lawler has written what Publisher’s Weekly hails as “part detective novel, part historical reckoning. . . leading to a thoughtful and timely discourse about race and identity.”

Lawler, the Starr Center’s 2016 – 2017 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown fellow, is the author of the highly acclaimed Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?. He is a contributing writer for Science, a contributing editor for Archaeology Magazine, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Slate.His book The Secret Token was written in part while in residence in Washington College’s 18th-century Patrick Henry House on Queen Street in Chestertown.

The Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship

The Starr Center administers the fellowship in partnership with the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions for the study of early America. Founded with a $1 million endowment from The Hodson Trust, the fellowship supports work on significant projects related to the literature, history, culture, or art of the Americas before 1830. Now in its fifth year, it welcomes submissions not only from traditional historians, but also from filmmakers, novelists, and creative and performing artists. washcoll.edu/centers/starr/fellowships

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 35 states and a dozen nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

During the summer of 1774, a Marylander named Michael Cresap was accused of the grisly massacre of Mingo Indians on the banks of the Ohio River. Although mystery continues to shroud the so-called Yellow Creek Massacre, the incident touched off events that helped fuel the outbreak of the American Revolution.

On Thursday, September 13, historian Robert Parkinson will discuss the legacy of this traumatic event. Cosponsored by the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the Rose O’Neill Literary House, the program is free and open to the public. The lecture begins at 5:30 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, Washington College.

Parkinson, an associate professor of history at Binghamton University whose research, writing, and teaching focus on war and race in colonial and revolutionary America, is the Starr Center’s 2018-2019 Patrick Henry Fellow. His first book, the critically acclaimed The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (North Carolina Press, 2016),won multiple prizes, including the Organization of American Historians’ distinguished James A. Rawley Prize, awarded to the best book of the year on U.S. race relations. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, Parkinson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary.

During his time in Chestertown, Parkinson will be working on his new book, The Heart of American Darkness: Savagery, Civility, and Murder on the Eve of the American Revolution. The book traces the story of the Yellow Creek Massacre, along with how this horrific incident was remembered and mythologized over the next several decades. Resonating with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Parkinson’s book will explore the 18th-century Ohio River Valley as another “dark place of the Earth,” revealing how the discourse of “savagery” and “civility” informed the American Revolution and nation’s founding ideas.

“This is a story of empire-on-the-make, of exploitation and cruelty, of death and derangement, of a strange river that opens up lands of potential and desire, of reputations made ‘out there,’” Parkinson says. “Further, it is a story that weighs heavily on our clean division between who is ‘savage’ and who is ‘civil.’”

Parkinson will be based at college’s 18th-century Custom House on the banks of the Chester River. In the spring, he will teach a class at Washington College.

About the Patrick Henry Fellowship:

Launched by the Starr Center in 2008, the Patrick Henry Fellowship aims to encourage reflection on the links between American history and contemporary culture, and to foster the literary art of historical writing. It is co-sponsored by the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College’s center for literature and the literary arts. The Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship’s funding is permanently endowed by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with further support provided by the Starr Foundation, the Hodson Trust, and other donors.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 35 states and a dozen nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

What was life like two centuries ago in the forested Iroquois country, a place where cultures met and frequently clashed?  It takes considerable literary skill to craft a historical novel that brings to life a society living on the edge of the Western wilderness. Evoking the beauty, danger, and wonder of the 18th-century American frontier requires a keen imagination, diligent research, an empathy for character, an affinity for place, and the ability to tell a good tale. Author Cam Terwilliger has honed these skills as he nears completion of his first novel, Yet Wilderness Grew in My Heart.

An accomplished fiction writer, journalist, editor, and teacher, Terwilliger is the 2018-19 Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellow, in residence this summer at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. The Brooklyn-based writer’s work has been published by literary magazines including Narrative, American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, and Post Road. Terwilliger teaches creative writing at Seton Hall University and serves as associate fiction editor for Bucknell University’s literary magazine, West Branch. He holds an MFA from Emerson College.

Set in New York and Quebec during the French and Indian War (also known as The Seven Years War), Terwilliger’s book reimagines the mythology of the founding of America, exploring issues of race, religion, capitalism, disease, landscape, the psychology of power, and the dense web of cultures that gave rise to the world we live in today.

The historical novel delves into an intermingling of cultures—Native American, European, and African—dramatizing the lives of the diverse characters who populate his story.The narrator is a wealthy physician who, suffering from syphilis, desperately seeks a natural cure in the fields and forests of the Hudson River valley. Then there’s a counterfeiter who escaped from slavery in New York City and is hiding out in the wilderness — and his wife, an enigmatic Mohawk woman.

Evoking a sense of place is important to Terwilliger’s writing. In the course of researching Yet Wilderness Grew in My Heart, Terwilliger spent time living in Montreal and upstate New York, where the story takes place. While visiting the Mohawk community of Kahnawà:ke outside Montreal, Terwilliger drew inspiration from the rich resources of KORLCC, the community’s language and cultural center. By studying in the center’s library, attending cultural events, and talking with members of the Mohawk community, Terwilliger worked to deepen the perspective of his narrative.

The Starr Center’s Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship supported two months of research at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, R.I. Terwilliger took a deep dive into rare 18th-century documents, including accounts of colonists seeking possible Native American cures for syphilis, as well as an early bestseller by a counterfeiter who wrote about his crimes and adventures.

After finishing the research portion of his fellowship, Terwillger arrived at Washington College in June where—living in the circa 1735 Patrick Henry House on Queen Street and working at the circa-1746 Custom House—he is enthused to revise and refine his manuscript in the colonial surrounds of Chestertown’s historical district.

“It’s a beautiful place to write a novel about the 18th century,” says Terwilliger. “The surroundings are peaceful, spacious, and inspirational. Fiction writers don’t usually have a lot of support for archival research, and that combined with two months of writing time in a place like Chestertown, makes the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship unique and valuable.”

The Starr Center cosponsors the fellowship with the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions for the study of early America. Endowed with a major grant from The Hodson Trust, it supports work on significant projects related to the literature, history, culture, or art of the Americas before 1830. The fellowship welcomes submissions not only from traditional historians, but also from filmmakers, novelists, and creative and performing artists.  For more information, please see https://www.washcoll.edu/centers/starr/fellowships/hodson-brown-fellowship.php

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 35 states and a dozen nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Marking the 20th anniversary of the Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory and the Year of the Bird, Washington College has announced a new scholarship for students who are interested in the science and study of birds. The Washington College Ornithology Scholarship will be awarded to two students in the incoming class of 2023, providing each $1,500 a year for four years.

The scholarship will help students take advantage of the unique opportunities that Washington College offers in birding and ornithology at Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory. The only observatory of its kind on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Foreman’s Branch is one of the few places where undergraduate students can receive long-term, hands-on training in the technical skills needed for ornithology studies.

Since 2008, the station has provided paid internships to 26 students, who are closely taught the precise skills needed to band, identify, and record data about songbirds. Student interns spend an entire semester (and often much more) at the station learning these skills while being closely mentored by master banders. Scholarship recipients will get priority status for these internships.

WC students and interns in front of Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory.

Located on the College’s 4,700-acre River and Field Campus (RAFC), Foreman’s Branch is an Audubon-designated Important Bird Area. The expansive habitat at RAFC, and the fact that the observatory is not located at migratory bottleneck, draws an enormous diversity of species.

On average, the station bands about 15,000 birds of about 130 species every year, and as of January 2018, it holds North American age records for 10 species, including orchard oriole (11 years), American goldfinch (10 years, 11 months), hermit thrush (10 years, 10 months), and grasshopper sparrow (9 years, 1 month).Last September, the station, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in March, banded its 250,000th bird, a common yellow throat.

The Washington College Ornithology Scholarship, which is funded by the College’s Center for Environment & Society, is being launched during the Year of the Bird, designated by the National Audubon Society, BirdLife International, National Geographic, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

For more information about the Washington College Ornithology Scholarship, visit https://www.washcoll.edu/centers/ces/ornithology-scholarship/

Learn more about Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory at www.washcoll.edu/birds

For more about Year of the Bird visit http://www.audubon.org/yearofthebird

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 35 states and a dozen nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.