Presidential Panels: Who Elected the College?

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Andrew Jackson Foundation

Presidential Panels: Who Elected the College?

Join us for this engagingly timely discussion about the creation and function of the Electoral College. This evening will begin with a foundation for the conversation—a panel of experts connecting the beginning of The United States' political history, Andrew Jackson’s experience with the college and today.

Tickets for Hermitage members are $20 and non-members $25. A portion of all sales will support the Andrew Jackson Foundation’s mission to preserve the home place of Andrew Jackson, create learning opportunities and inspire informed citizenship.

Date & Time

October 3, 2024 @ 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Location

4580 Rachel's Lane, Hermitage, TN 37076

Contact Information

Name: Andrew Jackson's Hermitage

Phone: 615-889-2941

Email: info@thehermitage.com

Description

Join us for this engagingly timely discussion about the creation and function of the Electoral College. This evening will begin with a foundation for the conversation—a panel of experts connecting the beginning of The United States' political history, Andrew Jackson’s experience with the college and today.

Tickets for Hermitage members are $20 and non-members $25. A portion of all sales will support the Andrew Jackson Foundation’s mission to preserve the home place of Andrew Jackson, create learning opportunities and inspire informed citizenship.

Panelists include:

Dr. Robert Alexander, providing the lecture and a panelist. Alexander is a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University. His pioneering work on presidential electors has positioned him as an expert on the Electoral College. His book, Representation and the Electoral College (Oxford University Press, 2019) received stellar reviews and was chosen as an outstanding title by Choice Magazine for 2019. His research on electors was cited during arguments before the Supreme Court in 2020 and he has appeared as an expert on the Electoral College in numerous venues, including a feature-length documentary on CNN (Count on Controversy: Inside the Electoral College, 2020). He has published four books and his work has appeared in numerous academic journals. Dr. Alexander enjoys his work with students and has been recognized for his commitment to them, receiving multiple teaching awards over his career. He has served on the National Executive Committee for Pi Sigma Alpha (the national political science honor society) and on the National Liaison Advisory Board for The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. A frequent op-ed contributor, Professor Alexander's work has been published in USA Today, CNN.com, Real Clear Politics, and The Hill among many others. Dr. Alexander is often called upon by the media and his analysis has appeared in hundreds of print and television outlets including USA Today, CNN.com, NPR, the New York Times, BBC, Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, and CTV-Canada. He is on Twitter @onuprof.

Dr. Michael Woods, our Jackson expert and moderator, studies the political and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States, with particular interest in partisanship and the politics of sectionalism and slavery from the 1830s through Reconstruction. He is also the Director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson.

Wood's most recent book, entitled Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), uses a dual-biographical approach to study the internal conflict that wracked the antebellum Democratic Party. Through the intertwined but often bitterly opposed careers of Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis, he traced the deep roots of the party’s dramatic rupture in 1860.

His first book, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (Cambridge University Press, 2014), received the Southern Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Award for the best new book on the sectional conflict and/or secession. In it, he traced how emotions such as indignation and jealousy shaped regional and partisan identities, fostered pro- and antislavery political coalitions, and ultimately mobilized northerners and southerners to fight.

His second book, Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border (Routledge, 2016) is an undergraduate-oriented text that combines his original narrative with edited primary documents. It surveys Kansas’s bloody Civil War-era history through the eyes of diverse combatants, from an Irish-born Missouri slaveholder to a self-emancipated freedman who died trying to liberate his wife

Currently, he is at work on a book-length study of John H. Van Evrie, a shadowy but notorious northern proslavery propagandist. Operating out of New York City, Van Evrie wrote, edited, and published some of the mid-nineteenth-century’s most repulsive racist and proslavery texts. Perhaps most enduringly influential for popularizing the slogan “white supremacy,” Van Evrie was an aggressive publicist who repackaged academic ideas about racial hierarchy into a product that he peddled to a wide audience. Drawing on the histories of medicine, science, journalism and publishing, and politics, this project will explain how Van Evrie turned a struggling urban newspaper into the cornerstone of a racist publishing empire.

Woods has published articles in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, Slavery & Abolition, West Virginia History, the Journal of American History, and the Journal of Social History. His research has been supported by American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At the University of Tennessee, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, political history, slavery and emancipation, and the history of emotions.