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NOTE: Tickets for the Feb. 25 event featuring Jon Meacham are sold out.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, will discuss his latest book, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, at Vanderbilt on Wednesday, Feb. 25.
Meacham will be in conversation with former NBC News anchor and correspondent John M. Seigenthaler beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Commodore Ballroom at the Student Life Center, 310 25th Ave. S. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. The event is hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries, Dialogue Vanderbilt, The Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy and the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies in collaboration with Parnassus Books.
Tickets for the talk are $41.75 each and include one general admission seat and a pre-signed copy of American Struggle, to be published Feb. 17 by Penguin Random House. There will be no book signing line at this event.
In American Struggle, Meacham illuminates the United States’ complicated past by assembling the consequential speeches, letters and essays that have brought us to the present moment. This rich and diverse collection covers a wide spectrum of history, from 1619 to the 21st century, with primary source documents that take us back to critical moments in which Americans fought over the meaning and the direction of the national experiment.
From the founders to presidents Lincoln and Obama, from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, from Seneca Falls to the March on Washington, this anthology tells the story of the country and its people. As clashes over liberty and slavery, inclusion and exclusion play out, these voices, framed by Meacham’s singular commentary, remind us that contentious citizenship and fair-minded observations are essential to bringing about the more perfect union envisioned in the Preamble to the Constitution, which Frederick Douglass called a “glorious liberty document.”
“With American Struggle, Jon Meacham gives us exactly what we need as we approach the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. “The documents presented (here) remind us, in this very difficult time, of the country’s sometimes fraught journey toward creating a more perfect union.”
Called “our era’s preeminent historian of America’s values” by biographer Walter Isaacson, Meacham is The New York Times bestselling author of And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle; Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, for which he won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography; Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship; Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush; His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope; and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. He is a co-founder of Vanderbilt’s Unity Project and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.
Seigenthaler is managing partner of FINN Partners in Nashville. During his 11 years at NBC News, he anchored NBC Nightly News’ weekend edition and appeared on Meet the Press, Dateline, TODAY, Weekend TODAY, MSNBC, CNBC and the Discovery Channel. He also was an anchor and reporter for local television news at KOMO in Seattle and WKRN and WSMV in Nashville. Seigenthaler is a member of the Newseum Board of Trustees, the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, and the judging committee for the RFK Journalism Awards. He also serves on the board of trustees for the not-for-profit organization You Have the Power, whose mission is to empower those victimized by crime.
The Feb. 25 event is part of the Heard Libraries’ celebration of America250, a nationwide non-partisan initiative to engage every American in the 250th anniversary of the United States.