Conversations at the Washington Library

Season 5 of Conversations at the Washington Library is just around the corner. Until then, we're happy to bring you Jim Ambuske's recent live stream chat with Dr. Jessica Lowe of the University of Virginia School of Law. 

Long-time fans of the podcast will recognize Dr. Lowe’s name from an episode Ambuske recorded with her in 2019...

Season 5 of the podcast drops in a few weeks. In the meantime, we're pleased to offer you Library Executive Director Kevin Butterfield’s recent live stream conversation with Edward J. Larson. Larson is the author of many books, including the subject of today's show, Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership.

We need your help to make Season 5 of Conversations the best one yet. Please take a moment to complete our listener survey that will help shape the future of the show...

On today's show, we bring you the audio from our annual Martha Washington Lecture. This year's topic was Mary Ball Washington, George's mother, and the recent work by historians to rethink what we know about her life. Dr. Karin Wulf, executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, served as our guest moderator for this event...

It’s easy to think of slave holding as a male profession. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and countless other men are often the names that come to mind when we think about early Americans who held other people in bondage.

But white women, especially in the American South, were equally invested in slavery as owners in human property. A new generation of historians is helping us to understand why and how.

One such scholar is Dr...

The Syphax Family has deep historic ties to Mount Vernon and other sites of enslavement in Virginia.

In 1821, Charles Syphax, an enslaved man at Arlington House in Northern Virginia, married Maria Carter, the daughter of a woman enslaved at Mount Vernon. Charles was the inherited property of George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s grandson. And there is very strong evidence that the woman that Charles married, Maria, was Custis’s daughter...

This episode originally aired in September 2019.

You may know him as Robert E. Lee’s father, but Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee was so much more. Born into a Virginia dynasty, the man who would become one of George Washington’s protégés came of age with the American Revolution itself. Lee was a graduate of Princeton University, a cavalry commander in the war’s brutal southern theater, and he later served two terms as Virginia’s governor...