October 23
Thursday, 7 PM

Writing the Lives of Presidents: A Panel Discussion. Two distinguished presidential biographers — Joyce Appleby (Thomas Jefferson) and H.W. Brands (Woodrow Wilson) discuss the problems, responsibilities and joys of lluminating presidential lives.

Joyce Appleby (Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination) is Professor of History at UCLA. H.W. Brands (The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush) is Distinguished Professor of History at Texas A&M University. Moderated by John F. Cooke, Chairman, Board of Directors, Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

"Appleby has succeeded in writing as good a brief study of this complex man as is imaginable. Another in a series on the American chief executives edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., her elegant book is a liberal's take on the complex, sphinx-like founder of American liberalism. Appleby convincingly argues that the third president's greatest legacies were limited government (breached, however, by the opportunism that characterized his own presidency) and the great expansion of democracy . . . She fully explains the man's sorry record and tortured views on slavery and race. Providing along the way a short, up-to-date history of the early 19th-century nation, she also concisely surveys the day's great issues-voting, democracy, political parties, commerce, westering and religion." - Publishers Weekly

"For nearly a century, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson has haunted the councils of governments and the conduct of diplomacy. When the United Nation mediates armed struggles or dispatches peacekeepers, it follows a path charted by Wilson at Paris in 1919; when the United States promotes democracy in Eastern Europe or central Asia or the Middle East, it pursues a vision first given broad currency by Wilson. The American Senate disavowed Wilson when it rejected the Treaty of Versailles, but eight decades later we are all Wilsonians, whether we like it or not. Who was this man—this unique case of an American president whose influence far transcended his own country and long outlasted his own time? - H. W. Brands on Woodrow Wilson

Co-presented by Facing History & Ourselves.