I have given more than 300 lectures on history and my writings to audiences from my hometown of Independence, Missouri, to New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Paris. They generally run for about 45 minutes and are illustrated with PowerPoint. Fee negotiable.
Yarrow Mamout and His Family
Yarrow Mamout’s is one of the most remarkable success stories in American history. Brought to Maryland on a slave ship in 1752 and enslaved for the next forty years, Yarrow (his last name) didn’t become a free man until he was 60 years old. He had a house in Georgetown and saved enough to retire on the interest from loans to white merchants and on stock dividends. In 1819, the great portrait painter Charles Willson Peale learned of Yarrow and painted a “remarkable likeness” as a testament to racial equality. This presentation is based on my book, From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family, and tells the story of this remarkable man.
Differing Historical Perspectives on Slavery in Maryland and the District of Columbia
The word “slavery” brings up a mental image of the “peculiar institution” as it existed in the Deep South right before the Civil War. Slavery in the Washington area was different. It began the same – in the late 1600s, Ninian Beall’s tobacco plantation occupied the land where the White House is today – but it soon changed. After tobacco wore out the land, the use of enslaved labor made less economic sense, and it was hard to enforce with an increasingly diverse capital of the United States. By the time of the Civil War, Washington, D.C. still had enslaved people, but they lived among a population of free African Americans. This lecture originated when a friend asked me to develop a talk based on the differing perspectives on slavery that emerge from my two books, The Recollections of Margaret Loughborough, about a daughter of the Old Dominion of Virginia, and From Slave Ship to Harvard, which follows six generations of an African American family in Maryland.
Potomac, a History of the River and the Land
The Potomac River, a dominant geological feature of the East Coast, has also played a dominant role in American history. It was the first interstate waterway in North America, the spawning ground for the Constitution, and a protective barrier in the Civil War. To travelers today, it is a time tunnel to 250 million years of history. Learning this history lets you walk along the Potomac and see it in a new way.
Harry Truman's Independence, The Center of the World
Back in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, a day after he stepped down from being President of the United States, Harry Truman stood in front of his house and told reporters: “Well, it’s good to be back home in what I call the center of the world, Independence, Missouri. I think it is the greatest town in the United States…. And I think you’ll find everybody in Independence feels the same way about this town.” I was nine years old then and lived about a mile from Truman’s house on North Delaware Street, and I couldn’t have agreed more. For as long as I could remember, tourists were stopping me on the street to ask where “the President’shouse” was. And there were the occasional reports from Independence on national television.
Independence was the quintessential, American, small town with a population of around ten thousand. I could get around most of the town on a bicycle. My family didn’t know the Trumans, but they knew people who did. For the article in the White House Magazine that is the basis for this talk, I contacted friends and high school classmates and used the Truman Library’s resources to describe what the town was like then, how townspeople interacted with the former president, and how Harry Truman himself felt. To paraphrase that post-World War One song, how was Truman going to stay down on the farm, now that he’d seen “Paree?” It wasn’t easy, yet perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments was that he managed the transition.
This lecture is based on my article in White House History Magazine.
James Alexander Simpson, An Example of Early American Portrait Painters
True artists were rare in the Mid-Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Tobacco planters might pay for a portrait, but this was a luxury for the rich. Good, European-trained artists did not want to make the perilous ocean crossing for uncertain reward. This is why “primitive” or self-taught artists, like Georgetown’s James Alexander Simpson, are so important to our understanding of the colonial period. Through their portraits and landscapes, we can see how America and Americans looked before photographs were invented.
The Loughborough Family of Montgomery County, Maryland
For 162 years, the Loughboroughs were one of the most prominent families in Washington and southern Montgomery County. Nathan Loughborough was a Quaker, working for the Treasury Department in Philadelphia, who moved here with the government in 1800. After he left government, he applied his financial expertise on the board of the Farmers and Mechanics Bank in Georgetown, the C&O Canal Company, and the Washington (Rockville) Turnpike. He owned twin townhouses in Georgetown, a 250-acre estate in northwest Washington called Grasslands, an 800-acre tobacco farm in Bethesda called Milton, and an estate in Middleburg, Virginia,called Rokeby that later became the famous Melon farm there. Loughboro Road and Loughborough Lane are named for him. Later generations of the family fought in the Civil War on the Confederate side and aided the Confederacy. They also left memoirs of those times which can now be found in speaker Johnston’s book on the Loughborough family entitled, The Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough: A Southern Woman’s Memories of Richmond, VA and Washington, DC in the Civil War. More about the book and the Loughborough family may be found at Johnston's blog for the book.
Colonial Taverns
Taverns in colonial times served many purposes. Alcohol was perhaps the main one, but they also provided food, sleep, news, gossip, and fellowship. Commonly the largest building in a town, a tavern might also serve as the courthouse, jail, stagecoach station, and community center. The American Revolution was born and lubricated in the tavern This lecture shares their fascinating and complex history.
Rowser’s Ford, Where the South Lost the Battle of Gettysburg
On the night of June 27, 1863, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart crossed the Potomac River with 5,000 horsemen including artillery at “Rowser’s Ford” and proceeded to ransack Montgomery County. Stuart’s actions proved a catastrophe for the Confederacy because he should have been with Robert E. Lee’s army in Pennsylvania. Moving blindly without his cavalry, Lee stumbled into the huge Union army at a place called Gettysburg where he was soundly defeated. To deflect criticism, Stuart wrote a report glorifying his crossing at Rowser’s Ford as a heroic, superhuman effort. In more recent times, markers have been erected at the supposed site on the C&O Canal at Violette’s and Riley’s locks. Visitors marvel at the courage of Stuart and his men to cross the mile-wide river, filled with rocks, rapids, and whirlpools. But the markers, and history, misplace the site. It was actually two miles downriver in a placid, sandy-bottomed part of the Potomac on John Rowzee’s farm. The lecture unravels a historical mystery.
A Field Guide to Civil War Statues in Washington
In recent years, America has commemorated valor by erecting monuments to entire wars, such as the World War II and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorials. Civil War veterans did it differently. They remembered themselves in monuments through their generals. Johnston uses the statues to tell the story of the Civil War and of the artistry that went into them.
The Man Who (Almost) Conquered Washington: Gen. John McCausland
Confederate General John McCausland bragged to Ulysses Grant that McCausland had come closer to taking the city than any other Confederate general. Was he right, or was he just telling another tall soldier’s tale? And then there’s that “Chambersburg thing.” His grandson didn’t want to talk about it. McCausland had the city burned down.