Henry Wiencek: Named Washington College's First Patrick Henry Fellow

Source: *Press Release--Washington
College*<http://news.washcoll.edu/press_releases/2008/07/09_patrickhenryfellow.php>(7-22-08)

He is a renowned author, a prodigious researcher, and a compelling speaker,
whose work has been praised by literary critics and academic historians
alike. And now Henry Wiencek, whose honors include the National Book Critics
Circle Award for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History,
has been named the first Patrick Henry Fellow at Washington College,
launching a new program that will provide annual writing fellowships to
nationally prominent historians.

The highly competitive new fellowship, which is provided by the College's
C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, offers a
yearlong residency to authors doing innovative work on America's founding
era and its legacy. The fellowship's funding will be permanently endowed as
part of a $2.5 million challenge grant package that the National Endowment
for the Humanities awarded last year through its nationwide "We the People"
initiative, dedicated to strengthening the teaching, study, and
understanding of American history and culture. As part of the fellowship
award, Wiencek and future recipients will live in a newly restored 1735
house in the heart of Chestertown's colonial historic district.

Wiencek, who will teach a class at the College and be involved in many of
its programs, will have an office at the Starr Center, just down the street
from the Patrick Henry Fellows' Residence in Chestertown's 18th-century
Custom House. He will use the fellowship year to complete a forthcoming book
about Thomas Jefferson and his slaves.

"It is an honor indeed to be the first Patrick Henry Fellow," said Wiencek,
whose book is under contract to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
"With its dynamism and imaginative leadership, the C.V. Starr Center is
becoming a major force in the study of American history, and I very much
look forward to being a contributor to the excellent work going on there."

Wiencek, who lives in Charlottesville, Va., is perhaps best known for An
Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America,
which Farrar, Straus & Giroux published in 2003 to superlative reviews and
which was named Best Book of that year by the Society for Historians of the
Early American Republic. The historian Gordon Wood, writing in the New York
Times, called it "superb" and the Washington Post said, "It must be read by
all who wish to understand early America."

"I can't think of a better person to be the inaugural recipient of this
fellowship than Henry Wiencek," said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold
Director of the Starr Center. "His work exemplifies everything that we had
hoped the Henry Fellowship would stand for: innovative research, brilliant
writing, and a commitment to grappling with some of the biggest and most
difficult subjects in American history."

Wiencek has written and/or edited more than a dozen books. The Hairstons: An
American Family in Black and White (St. Martin's, 1999)—the epic story of
two extended Virginia families who share a surname and a legacy, though one
is black and the other white—was a selection of the Book of the Month Club
and the History Book Club. "Not since Mary Chesnut's Civil War has
nonfiction about the South been as compelling as fiction," wrote a reviewer
for Time magazine.

His work-in-progress, on Jefferson and his slaves, promises to shed new
light on a subject that has received much attention, but often only through
the narrow prism of the Sally Hemings controversy or the intellectual
paradox of Jefferson's views on race and liberty. Wiencek has done major new
archival research and drawn on archaeological discoveries to document the
daily experience of slavery at Monticello. "We've seen Jefferson's relations
with slaves entirely through the eyes of Sally Hemings and her family,"
Wiencek said. "But she was just one of 600 slaves at Monticello. Life for
the Hemings family was one thing. Life for those laboring farther down the
hill was quite different." Wiencek will give two public lectures on his work
during the fellowship year, the first on September 8.

In this inaugural year, the Henry Fellowship drew applications from a number
of nationally renowned historians. By supporting writers who are completing
books on this period, the Patrick Henry Fellowship is meant to encourage
reflection on the links between American history and contemporary culture,
and to foster the literary art of historical writing. The fellowship is
co-sponsored by the Rose O'Neill Literary House, Washington College's center
for literature and the creative arts. The Henry Fellowship complements the
George Washington Book Prize, which is also administered by the Starr Center
and awarded annually to an author whose work advances public understanding
of the Revolution and its legacy.

The restored Patrick Henry Fellows' Residence will be opened with an
official ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 18, shortly after Wiencek and
his wife, Donna Lucey—also a writer on history, whose books include Archie
and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (Macmillan, 2006)—move in.
The College bought the house in January 2007 with a $1.05 million gift from
the Barksdale-Dabney-Patrick Henry Family Foundation, established by the
Nuttle family of Talbot County, direct descendants of the patriot Patrick
Henry. The gift has also allowed the house to be extensively restored and
furnished, and will endow its longterm maintenance. Known as the
Buck-Chambers House, it is one of the oldest buildings in Chestertown, and
has historic connections with Washington College stretching back to the
1780s. An early owner, Gen. Benjamin Chambers, who had served as an officer
in the Revolutionary army under George Washington, became the College's
first treasurer in 1782, and later served as president of its Board of
Visitors and Governors.

About the C.V. Starr Center
The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores our
nation's history—and particularly the legacy of its Founding era—in
innovative ways. Through educational programs, scholarship, and public
outreach, and especially by supporting and fostering the art of written
history, the Starr Center seeks to bridge the divide between past and
present, and between the academic world and the public at large. From its
base in the circa-1746 Custom House along Chestertown's colonial waterfront,
the Center also serves as a portal onto a world of opportunities for
Washington College students. Its guiding principle is that now more than
ever, a wider understanding of our shared past is fundamental to the
continuing success of America's democratic experiment. For more information
on the Center and on the Patrick Henry Fellowships, visit
http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

About the The Rose O'Neill Literary House
The Rose O'Neill Literary House, hub of Washington College's writing
community, is the venue for co-curricular activities that bring together
students and faculty with visiting writers, scholars, editors and other
literary artists. The creative writing culture here is grounded in the
College's longstanding commitment to foster good writing across all
disciplines, and to connect students and faculty to the wider culture of
literature and the creative arts.

 Posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008

-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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