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Part of The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by “the Commodore,” subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius’s grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all.

Now, the Commodore’s great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family’s empire, basked in the Commodore’s wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other.

Written with a unique insider’s viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer of historical fiction. Her adult novels are The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009 and was named one of USA Today’s top ten books of the year, and The House of Velvet and Glass, which was a USA Today bestseller in 2011. For young adults, Katherine has written Conversion, which received the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award in young adult literature, and a New York City-based literary ghost story called The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen, which was named a 2016 “Must Read” for young adults by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. In 2014 she edited The Penguin Book of Witches for Penguin Classics, a primary source reader on the history of witchcraft in England and North America which made a regional bestseller list and which has been translated into Spanish and Russian. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, her latest novel for adults, was published by Henry Holt and Co in summer 2019. She co-wrote Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Anderson Cooper, out now from Harper. Her upcoming books include her next novel, A True Account of Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, forthcoming 11/21/23 from Holt, along with a nonfiction reader called The Penguin Book of Pirates. She is currently at work on her next project with Cooper, also for next fall, called Astor.

She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” the BBC, and the History Channel, and she hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for National Geographic. Her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2015 she was the visiting writer in residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, and she spent 2016 as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University, and she has taught American history, visual culture, and writing at BU, Cornell, and Montserrat College of Art. Her first published works were three brief catalogue essays in an architectural monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. 

Join experts Fintan Mullan and Gillian Hunt from the Ulster Historical Foundation to learn how to get the most out of Irish resources and gain tips and tricks for breaking down brick walls. The seminar will explore strategies for researching Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors. The programme content covers the whole island of Ireland, not solely Ulster.

Program topics will include:

• Introduction to Irish and Scots-Irish Family History Research
• Records Related to the Different Churches in Ireland
• The Ulster Plantation and sources for finding seventeenth century families in Ireland
• General Questions and Answers and Brick Walls

Ulster Historical Foundation has been helping people in North America trace their Irish and Ulster ancestors for 60 years, and is one of the most experienced, long established, and highly reputable organizations in Ireland in the field of Irish family history.

These sessions will help the beginner and the seasoned genealogist alike.

Fintan Mullan is the Executive Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation, an educational non-profit organization which specializes in historical research and publications. Gillian Hunt is a Research Officer with the Foundation.

Part of the The Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today’s conservative political landscape.

We remember him as a bulldog–squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls–but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people–many of them communists or racial minorities or both– did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history.

Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party.

G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history–not at the fringes, but at the center–and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century American history at Yale. She is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She writes frequently for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, and is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage. Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War.

Carole Emberton is professor of history at the University at Buffalo. An NEH public scholar, she is the author of the prize-winning Beyond Redemption. She has written for the New York Times and Washington Post.

Our idea of the Founders’ America and its values is not true. We are not the heirs of the Founders, but we can be the heirs of Reconstruction and its vision for equality.

There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.

America today is not the Founders’ America, but it can be Lincoln’s America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country’s history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, he is the author of The Myth of Judicial Activism, as well as two novels, Allegiance and In the Shadow of the Law.

This event is part of our Dine and Dialogue series. The lecture is at 6 PM at the Filson. There is a dinner following the lecture at Buck's Restaurant for those that purchase that ticket option.