and it was a finalist for the library company of philadelphia's first book award. he specializes in early african american and american print culture citizenship studies and african-american intellectual history in his first book the practice of citizenship lack politics and print culture in the early united states published by the university of pennsylvania, press in 2019 won the modern language association prize for first book and the bibliographical society st. Our first discussion this afternoon is derek our aspires and associate professor of literatures in english and affiliate faculty in american studies visual studies media studies at cornell university. the essays that appeared off and on the front pages or the advertisements that would appear and so that's for for the common cause that's what i did i went and looked at lots and lots and lots of prints and i instead of doing what previous generations of historians had done and looking at newspapers and looking at either. so this is this adam's thinking about about how are people gonna figure out what happened in 1776. this is in his the other letter he writes about this same topic to jefferson three years before he writes denial.

i think he in his mind he thinks about people who would become historians should undertake a laborious, but certainly interesting and amusing tasks of searching and collecting the records pamphlets newspapers and even hand bills of the 13 colonies to find out how the temper and views of the people had changed. um about what how the revolution came about he said young men and letters of all the states about this.

Next thing that john adams says in this letter to hezekiah niles, which says this if he says if you want to know why i'm right. our announcement of the spring winter schedule will be available early in the new year behind the scenes are two people who make these seminars possible pete beer stecker of the wilson center and rachel wheatley of the national history center, and as always we'd like to thank our institutional supporters the george washington university department of history as well as any number of anonymous individual donors and as we say the seminar has been meeting weekly and pre-covid times in person at the wilson center and since the pandemic here in the virtual realm this is the final seminar of the season, but we will return on january 23rd with a full lineup that will take us to the end of may. the washington history seminar is a collaborative venture of the woodrow wilson center's history and public policy program and the american historical associations national history center. Omahundra institute and with us this afternoon to introduce our speaker is the institute's interim executive director catherine kelly about whom i will say more in a moment.

The 13 clocks