Creating a More Perfect Community is a Teaching American History grant awarded to Alexandria City Public Schools and funded by the United States Department of Education. A partnership with George Mason University and the Office of Historic Alexandria, this grant is an exceptional professional development opportunity for teachers to improve their content knowledge through a year-long study.

In a city where students come from 75 different countries this project seeks to create a stronger sense of community through a deeper understanding of history. The project includes six workshops and a summer seminar featuring university historians, four book discussions, visits to historic sites, and the opportunity for teachers to participate in a professional community to enhance their instructional skills to work successfully with students.

The Creating a More Perfect Community website will serve participating teachers to help them complete the requirements of the project. On this website you will find:

  • Schedule: Current information regarding the schedule, workshops, site visits and book discussion groups.
  • Conversations: A discussion section where teachers will share reflections, information and resources.
  • Resources: A compendium of resources developed by a professional community of master teachers, historians, curators and participating teachers.
  • Curriculum Units: Final versions of curriculum units for browsing or searching.

Project Steering Committee

Project Coordinator, Linda Driscoll

Curriculum Specialist for
Social Studies for Alexandria City Public Schools, Judy A. McConville

Project Assistant, Patrice Mortson

Academic Program Director, Kelly Schrum

Museum Educator, Ruth Reeder

Office of Historic Alexandria Director, Jean Taylor Frederico

Senior Historian, Roy Rosenzweig

Senior Historian, Charles Errico

Project Presenters

Terry Alford

Ira Berlin

Richard Bromberg

Jane Turner Censer

Barbara Clark Smith

Todd Endo

Chares Errico

Peter Henriques

T. Mills Kelly

Wendi Manuel-Scott

Melani McAlister

Michael O'Malley

Carla Peterson

Donald Ritchie

Harry Rubenstein

Tom Scheinfeldt

Kelly Schrum

Suzanne Smith

John Vernon

Ronald Walters

Rosemarie Zagarri

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Office of Historic Alexandria

Pamela Cressey

Jean Taylor Frederico

Ruth Reeder

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Project Steering Committee

Project Coordinator: Clorinda (Linda) Driscoll was a teacher for twenty-five years in Fairfax County Public Schools, receiving an exemplary rating. She chaired a social studies department, and taught a variety of courses including American history, economics, and Advanced Placement Government and Politics. In addition, Ms. Driscoll was a consultant to the Educational Testing Service (ETS) serving on the Advanced Placement Test and Development committee for Government and Politics and coordinated the evaluation of AP examinations. Ms. Driscoll also worked for New American Schools (NAS) as an Associate for Standards & Evaluation. In that capacity, she brought her teaching background to the education-reform policy arena managing a project for the development of the Guidelines for Ensuring the Quality of Design-Based Assistance, and serving as a review team leader for the due diligence process for adding new teams to the NAS portfolio. Ms. Driscoll worked as a consultant for Junior Achievement developing curriculum and the Northern Regional Park Authority conducting historical research. Ms. Driscoll received her BA from Our Lady of Good Counsel College, now part of the State University of New York. She earned an MA from Montclair State College and has completed graduate work at the University of Virginia and George Mason University.

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Curriculum Specialist for Social Studies for Alexandria City Public Schools: Judy A. McConville, Curriculum Specialist for Social Studies in the Alexandria City Public Schools, is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia, with a B.A. in History and received a Masters in teaching Government from the University of Virginia. She has taught in the Alexandria City Public Schools for several years, serving as a department chairperson, prior to becoming Curriculum Specialist in 1998. She is currently responsible for the citywide History and Social Science curriculum, K-12. She was appointed chairperson of the World History Committee by the Virginia Department of Education during the revisions of the Standards of Learning, 2000-2001. As a committee chairperson, she served on the state wide Management Committee which determined the final revisions for all standards, K-12. She has served on a state wide Content Review committee and will serve on an End of Course Bias Review Committee for History and Social Sciences, August 2003. She is currently serving as President of the Virginia Consortium of Social Studies Specialists and College Educators (VCSSSCE).

Project Assistant: Patrice Mortson received her bachelors degree in History and Economics from George Mason University in August 2003 where she graduated with high distinction. Her past work experience has been in the field of health care management. In addition to her administration of the “Creating a More Perfect Community” Teaching American History Grant Program with Alexandria City Public Schools, she is also project assistant with a consortium of seven Virginia school distructs in a Teaching American History Program titled “Peopling the American Past.” She is currently pursuing a masters in education at George Mason University.

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Academic Program Director: Kelly Schrum is the Assistant Director of the Center for History and New Media and Assistant Research Professor at George Mason University. She has worked extensively in the areas of new media, history content development, and teacher training. She has authored numerous articles on history and new media, including “Surfing the Past Online: New Media and History in the Classroom,” in Perspectives (May 2003); “Making History on the Web Matter in Your Classroom,” in The History Teacher (May 2001); and “History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web,” in Social Education (April 2001). She has made numerous presentations on teaching and new media for organizations such as the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Council for Social Studies. Schrum received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and is currently revising her dissertation, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1950 for publication (Palgrave Macmillan Press, forthcoming). Other publications include “'That Cosmopolitan Feeling': Teenage Girls and Literacy, 1920-1970,” in Girls and Literacy in the U.S.: A Historical Sourcebook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, in press) and “'Teena Means Business': Teenage Girls' Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944-1950” in Sherrie Inness, ed., Delinquent Daughters: Twentieth-Century American Girls' Culture (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

Office of Historic Alexandria, Director of the Office of Historic Alexandria: Jean Taylor Federico has served as the director of the Office of Historic Alexandria since 1983. Before her current work, she directed and curated the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum from 1975-1983. She has also served as registrar for the University of Maryland Art Gallery and taught at the University of Maryland and University of Michigan. She has published Clues to American Furniture (StarHill Press, Washington, D.C., 1988, rev.1991) and other articles related to museum artifacts and museum work. She currently is on the Potomac Heritage Partnership Advisory Panel and served in the Governor's Initiatives for History Museums from 1996-1998. Under her direction the Gadsby's Tavern Museum, The Lyceum, Fort Ward Museum and Historic Site received accreditation. She studied for her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan where her thesis discussed the “Art Criticism of Diderot and Zola.” She received her M.A. from the University of Michigan and her B.A. from Northwestern University.

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Museum Educator: Ruth Reeder has served as the Education Coordinator for all the City owned and privately operated historic sites in Alexandria, Virginia offering educational programs for group tours. As liaison between the historic facilities and the group organizer, often a teacher, she coordinates and structures the programs to accommodate any specific needs or requests.Over the years she has worked closely with both the historic site educators and Alexandria City Public School teachers and staff to design programs that address the Virginia Standards of Learning.

 

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Senior Historians: Roy Rosenzweig is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at George Mason University, where he also heads the Center on History and New Media (CHNM). He is the co-author, with Elizabeth Blackmar, of The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, which won several awards including the 1993 Historic Preservation Book Award and the 1993 Urban History Association Prize for Best Book on North American Urban History. He also co-authored (with David Thelen) The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, which has won prizes from the Center for Historic Preservation and the American Association for State and Local History. He was the lead author of the CD-ROM, Who Built America?, which won James Harvey Robinson Prize of American Historical Association for its “outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history.” His other books include Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge University Press) and edited volumes on history museums (History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment), history and the public (Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public), history teaching (Experiments in History Teaching), oral history (Government and the Arts in 1930s America), and recent history (A Companion to Post-1945 America). He currently serves as Vice-President of the Research Division of the American Historical Association and he recently won the Richard W. Lyman Award (awarded by the National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation) for “outstanding achievement in the use of information technology to advance scholarship and teaching in the humanities.”

Charles Errico is the assistant dean and professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College. He is also part of the graduate history faculty at George Mason University. Dr. Errico earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the co-author of a recent (2003) book entitled Portrait of America. He has won numerous teaching awards including ones from the Alumni Federation, the Educational Foundation, and the Carnegie Institute.

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Project Presenters

Terry Alford is a Professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College. He earned a doctoral degree in history at Mississippi State University and did post-doctoral studies at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of Prince among Slaves (1986) and the editor of John Wilkes Booth: A Sister's Memoir by Asia Booth Clarke (1996). He is currently writing an interpretive life of Booth for Oxford University Press. Alford is a founding board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and serves on the board of advisors for the Lincoln Herald.

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Ira Berlin has written broadly on the history of slavery and emancipation in the United States and the larger Atlantic world. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) won the Best First Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society. Berlin is the founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991. The project's multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary history of Emancipation (1982, 1985, 1990, 1993) has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil-War studies of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. In 1999, his study of African-American life between 1619 and 1819 entitled Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America, published by Harvard University Press, was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history by Columbia University; Frederick Douglass Prize by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute; Owsley Prize by the Southern Historical Association, and the Rudwick Prize by the Organization of American Historians. That same year, the Humanities Council of Washington named Ira Berlin Outstanding Public Humanities Scholar of the Year.   He is currently the Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland and president of the Organization of American Historians.

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Richard Bromberg is a graduate of Northwestern Univ (BS) and Loyola Univ of Chicago (JD). He has been practicing immigration law in DC since 1984.  He has his my own firm, which conducts a general immigration practice with a emphasis on asylum cases.  He is an activist with Amnesty International and serve as the group coordinator of the Arlington (VA) AI group and also as the Area Coordinator for the State of Virginia.

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Jane Turner Censer , an associate professor of history at George Mason University, received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1980. Her newest book is The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895, appearing in 2003. Among her earlier works are North Carolina Planters and their Children, 1800-1860 (1984) and volumes four and six of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, (Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863 and The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874). She also edited and wrote an introduction for Sherwood Bonner's Like unto Like, a feminist novel about the Reconstruction South, re-published by the University of South Carolina Press as part of its “Southern Classics” series. Her essays and prize winning articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Southern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Journal of Legal History, Southern Cultures, and American Quarterly .

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Barbara Clark Smith has worked as curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, since completing her graduate work at Yale in 1983. Both her undergraduate and graduate study explored American history and culture, with particular focus on the society, politics, and material culture of early America. At the Smithsonian, she has produced exhibitions, developed artifactual collections, and given many public presentations about American history, often following museum needs and opportunities well beyond the area of early America. Her research has led to scholarly and popular publications, particularly in the fields of Revolutionary America and Public History.

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Todd Endo is the founder and director of the Urban Alternative located in south Arlington, Virginia along the west end of Columbia Pike (a poor and largely immigrant neighborhood). The Urban Alternative is a community-based, non-profit organization that creates partnerships among public and private organizations to work together on community development, with a focus on children and families. The Urban Alternative directly initiated and runs two computer centers and a pre-school at the Arlington Mill Community Center, which it helped to develop out of an old Safeway store on Columbia Pike. It manages a partnership of Community Technology Centers which runs eight computer centers in south Arlington; runs a parent component of the GEARUP program in conjunction with the Arlington Public Schools; an Intergroup project with organizations and residents in the west end of Columbia Pike; and facilitates other partnerships around youth programs, neighborhood organizing, and housing. Much of its current work focuses on organizing and advocating with the community as part of the redevelopment process along the west end of Columbia Pike. This advocacy has focused on affordable housing, public facilities, services, and empowerment of local residents on these and other issues of concern. Among many positions, he has been the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Policy Analysis for the Fairfax County Public Schools (1980-91 and the Assistant to the Superintendent of the Arlington Public Schools (1975-78). He also worked as the Assistant to the Director of the National Institute for Education in the Carter administration, the co-founder of the Institute for Educational Transformation (a partnership among a university-GMU, public schools, and businesses), educational director of a national group of street academies for high school dropouts, and an advisor to the Minister of Education in Egypt. He has a doctorate in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (1973) and other degrees in history. He has a wife and two married children, all of whom are professionally involved in some form of educational work with youth. The longest job he's had is coaching youth soccer (16 years) and he enjoys backpacking, volleyball, running, and reading.

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Charles Errico is the assistant dean and professor of history at Northern Virginia Community College. He is also part of the graduate history faculty at George Mason University. Dr. Errico earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the co-author of a recent (2003) book entitled Portrait of America. He has won numerous teaching awards including ones from the Alumni Federation, the Educational Foundation, and the Carnegie Institute

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Peter R. Henriques is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. He teaches American and Virginia history with special emphasis on Virginia and the American Revolution and the Virginia Founding Fathers. His book, The Death of George Washington: He Died as He Lived, was published by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in December of 2000, and his biography of George Washington for the National Park Service was published in the spring of 2002. The editor of the local history journal, Northern Virginia Heritage, his writings include: “The Final Struggle Between George Washington and the Grim King: Washington's Attitude Toward Death and Afterlife,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, winter, 1999 [Reprinted in Don Higginbotham, editor, George Washington Reconsidered (University Press of Virginia, 2001); “Major Lawrence Washington Versus the Reverend Charles Green: A Case Study of the Squire and the Parson,” VMHB, April, 1992; “An Uneven Friendship: The Relationship Between George Washington and George Mason,” VMHB, April, 1989; “George Washington-William Payne Fight: A New Explanation,” Northern Virginia Heritage, October, 1983; and “The Amiable George Washington,” NVH, February, 1978. A member of the editorial board for the George Washington Papers and of the Mount Vernon committee of George Washington Scholars, he is a frequent speaker at Mount Vernon, conducts a fall lecture series on Washington at Gadsby's Tavern, and is currently writing a book on various aspect of Washington's life and character.

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T. Mills Kelly is the Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media and Assistant Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University. He is also the Coordinator for the Western Civilization Program at George Mason. His research on Czech, Czechoslovak and Habsburg history, has appeared in such journals as the Austrian History Yearbook and Nationalities Papers. He is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled, “Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism and the Origins of Radical Nationalism in East Central Europe.” Professor Kelly was a Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1996 and is an alumnus of the Wilson Center's Junior Scholars Training Seminar. During the 1999-2000 academic year, he was a Pew National Fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and is currently the Co-Director of two National Endowment for the Humanities—funded Exemplary Education Projects: World History Matters (http://worldhistorymatters.org) and Women, World History and the Web. From 1998-2002, Professor Kelly was the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Civic Education Project (http://www.cep.org.hu), an international educational NGO working to bring about democratic reform and the improvement of higher education in the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

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Wendi Manuel-Scott is a doctoral student at Howard University and expects to receive her Ph.D. degree in December 2003 from the Department of History. Her fields of teaching strength are African Diaspora, Caribbean, and women's history in the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora. From 1998-2000 she was a fellow of the national program Preparing Future Faculty (PFF), which prepares graduate students for the professoriate. Currently she is a George Mason University pre-doctoral fellow in the history department. During the spring semester 2003 she taught “African American Women's History to 1877” and in the fall will teach “A History of the Caribbean from the Arawaks to the Rastafarians: 1492 to Present,” a course of her own design. Prior to joining George Mason University, she taught African Diaspora for nearly two years at Howard University, in addition to teaching at Coppin State College, and assisting in several conferences and research projects. She hold a bachelor's degree in history from the College of Charleston and a master's degree in history from Howard University.   After she successfully defended her masters' thesis “A Gendered Analysis of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association” she began to expand her research beyond the female adherents of Garveyism. Her new scope of inquiry considered West Indian activism in various Black nationalist, community, and labor organizations. Along these lines, she made research trips to Jamaica and London, where she discovered that from 1943-1947 over fifty thousand Jamaican men were contracted to work as agricultural workers in the United States. The product of this research is her dissertation, entitled “Soldiers of the Field: Jamaican Farm workers in the United States during World War II,” which she will defend this August.  

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Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of American Studies at GW, where she teaches about media, history, and globalization. She the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000, and has written extensively about American perceptions of the Middle East, including in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, and the Journal of American History. Her current research focuses on Christian evangelical views of global relations.

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Michael O'Malley received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. He taught at NYU and at Vassar College before coming to George Mason University in 1994. His specialty is 19th and 20th century cultural history, His dissertation was published as Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. He has additional publications on the history of timekeeping technology, the evolution of movie narrative, the practice of digital history and on the history of ideas about money and value. He is at work on a book about the history of American money. Other research interests include the history of the corporation and the history of recorded sound. He has also worked extensively in new media and history.

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Carla L. Peterson is a professor in the department of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the Women's Studies and American Studies departments as well as the Afro-American Studies Program. She is the author of “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). Peterson has also published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African-American literature and literary history. Her current project, Family History in Public Places, is a social and cultural history of African-American life in nineteenth-century New York City as seen through the lens of family history.

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Donald A. Ritchie has served since 1976 as associate historian in the United States Senate Historical Office, where he conducts an oral history program with retired members of the Senate staff. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, taught at the Cornell-in-Washington program, and served as president of the Oral History Association and on the council of the American Historical Association. Among his publications are James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (Harvard University Press); American Journalists: Getting the Story (Oxford University Press); The Oxford Essential Guide to the U.S. Government (Oxford University Press; and Doing Oral History (Oxford University Press).

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Harry Rubenstein is a curator in the Political History Collections, Division of Social History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. He has curated more than a dozen exhibitions, including co-curating the museum's recent major exhibition, The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden. His other exhibitions include: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A History of American Sweatshops, 1820-Present; Produce for Victory: Posters on the American Home Front, 1941-1945; and Badges of Pride: Symbols and Images of American Labor. As curator in the museum's social history division, Rubenstein shares responsibility for the political history, reform movements, and labor history collections.

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Tom Scheinfeldt is Managing Director of the September 11 Digital Archive and a Fellow of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard and a master's degree from Oxford, where he is currently finishing his doctorate in Modern History. His doctoral thesis examines the public role of science history in the inter-war period. His research interests include the history of popular science, the history of museums, and the changing role of history in society, and he has worked extensively in the fields of public history and museum studies. Scheinfeldt is the author of several published articles, including a recent piece in the February, 2003 newsletter of the Organization of American Historians. He has presented the results of his research to numerous scholarly bodies, including the Royal Society of London, the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, the History of Science Society, and the British Society for the History of Science. He has lectured before audiences at the Smithsonian Institution and worked on exhibitions at the National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and throughout the State of Colorado. He has appeared as an authority on public history in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the BBC, CNN, and MSNBC.

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Kelly Schrum (see above)

Suzanne Smith (African American, 20th century Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Urban and Popular Music) completed her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1996. Her new book, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Harvard University Press, January 2000), examines Motown and its relationship to the black community of Detroit and the civil rights movement. It was awarded third in the eleventh annual Gleason Music Book Awards, sponsored by NYU, Rolling Stone, and BMI. Her research interests include the relationship of popular culture, music and art to social protest; the study of film and collective memory; and the history of death in America. She has also contributed to various public history projects including the film Rachel Carson's Silent Spring for the American Experience series on PBS, and the series, I'll Make Me A World: African American Arts in the Twentieth Century, from Blackside Productions.

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John Vernon has served the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in many outreach capacities as archivist, historian, and teach and has directed several courses for outside researchers and potential users. Before coming to the Archives he served as a history professor at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) where he gradually became interested in using archival records to advance classroom teaching. To that end, he often worked with National Archives' and the Library of Congress's holdings to develop primarily black history and sports history-related educational articles, exhibit catalogs, and curriculum supplements. He has been employed at the National Archives since 1977.

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Ronald G. Walters has been at the Johns Hopkins University since 1970, where he is presently Professor of History. He took his undergraduate degree at Stanford University and received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. His earliest research was in American abolitionism and in the history of reform movements more generally. The result was two books, The Antislavery Impulse: American Abolitionism after 1830 (1976, 1984), and American Reformers (1978; revised edition, 1997). In addition he has published three edited works—Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (1974; reprt., with new preface, 2000); A Black Woman's Odyssey:   The Narrative of Nancy Prince (1990), and Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America (1997), as well as numerous articles and book reviews in scholarly journals. His present work divides between his interest in radical reform movements and research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American commercial popular culture, the subject of his essay in volume IV of Stanley Kutler, et al. eds., Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (1996). At Hopkins, Professor Walters has won two major teaching awards, been elected twice to the faculty Academic Council, and held numerous University, Arts and Sciences, and Peabody Conservatory committee assignments, including a term on the Provost's Committee on the Status of Women when it was first constituted. He also served two years as Special Assistant to the Provost and was first chair of the university-wide Diversity Leadership Council, 1997-1999.

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Rosemarie Zagarri (colonial and revolutionary America, early republic, early American women) received her PhD from Yale University in 1984. The author of The Politics of Size: Representation in the United States 1776-1850 (1987) and A Woman's Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (1995); she is also the editor of David Humphreys' “Life of General Washington with George Washington with George Washington's 'Remarks'” (1991). She has published articles in The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly and Reviews in American History. In the spring of 1993, the Fulbright Commission appointed her Thomas Jefferson Chair in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. In 1997-98, she received a research Fellowship for College Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently working on a project dealing with gender and the first political parties.

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Office of Historic Alexandria

Presenter: Pamela J. Cressey is a historical and urban archeologist. She currently serves at the City Archaeologist for Alexandria, Virginia. As well she has been an adjunct assistant and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at The George Washington University in Washington D.C. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Historian of the Year Award from the Alexandria Historical Society. She is the author of “Held in Trust, Community Archaeology in Alexandria, Virginia,” in Community Archaeology Handbook published by the Society for American Archaeology. As well as, The Alexandria Heritage trail, A Guide to Exploring A Virginia Town's Hidden Past (Capitol Books: 2002). She is also the editor of Alexandria Archaeology Publications (City of Alexandria). Cressey received her BA from the University of California, her M.A. from the University of Iowa, and her PhD from the University of Iowa in Anthropology.

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Presenter: Jean Taylor Federico has served as the director of the Office of Historic Alexandria since 1983. Before her current work, she directed and curated the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum from 1975-1983. She has also served as registrar for the University of Maryland Art Gallery and taught at the University of Maryland and University of Michigan. She has published Clues to American Furniture (StarHill Press, Washington, D.C., 1988, rev.1991) and other articles related to museum artifacts and museum work. She currently is on the Potomac Heritage Partnership Advisory Panel and served in the Governor's Initiatives for History Museums from 1996-1998. Under her direction the Gadsby's Tavern Museum, The Lyceum, Fort Ward Museum and Historic Site received accreditation. She studied for her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan where her thesis discussed the “Art Criticism of Diderot and Zola.” She received her M.A. from the University of Michigan and her B.A. from Northwestern University.

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Historic Site Coordinator: Ruth Reeder has served as the Education Coordinator for all the City owned and privately operated historic sites in Alexandria, Virginia offering educational programs for group tours. As liaison between the historic facilities and the group organizer, often a teacher, she coordinates and structures the programs to accommodate any specific needs or requests.Over the years she has worked closely with both the historic site educators and Alexandria City Public School teachers and staff to design programs that address the Virginia Standards of Learning.

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