Lafayette Symposium
November 9, 2024 | 10am-2:30pm
All Saints' Episcopal Church | 106 W. Church St., Frederick, MD 21701
FREE PROGRAM - REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED
The public is invited to attend a free symposium about the extraordinary life and legacy of the Marquis de Lafayette in honor of his historic visit to Frederick in December 1824. The symposium and lunch are sponsored by a generous grant from Delaplaine Foundation in partnership with American Friends of Lafayette, African American Resources Cultural and Heritage Society (AARCH), and the Lafayette Bicentennial in Frederick Committee. Pre-registration for the symposium and lunch is required (registration is now closed).
Lafayette’s heroic and complex life is presented by a panel of esteemed scholars, authors, and historians:
Speakers Include:
- Alan R. Hoffman is President of the American Friends of Lafayette and translator of the diary written by Lafayette’s private secretary, Auguste Levasseur, during the Farewell Tour entitled Lafayette in America 1824 and 1825. Alan’s presentation about the Farewell Tour shares his in-depth knowledge of Lafayette as the “hero of two worlds.”
- Dr. Cheryl Renee Gooch is Executive Director of African American Resources Cultural and Heritage (AARCH) Society, historian and museum educator. She is a passionate chronicler and interpreter of African American life and history and aspects of our shared American history that have been obscured. Dr. Gooch explores the dichotomy of Lafayette as a staunch abolitionist who supported a new country that continued the practice of enslavement, and the African American patriots whose efforts helped win America’s freedom from Britain.
- Nancy Spannaus is an author, political journalist, and public historian, whose expertise in American history, with emphasis on its economic development and particularly on Alexander Hamilton, has led to her co-authorship of several books. They include Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics, and Defeating Slavery: Hamilton's American System Showed the Way. Nancy discusses the political context for Lafayette's 1824 tour, which included heated debate over the Hamilton's economic program, known as the American System. That system offered an industrialization program as an alternative to the slave economy, an outlook that Lafayette very much shared.
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Stephanie Dray is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of historical women’s fiction. Her books highlight her fascination with revolutions and republics, and with ordinary people, especially women, rising to extraordinary circumstances. Stephanie discusses this fascination as depicted in her recent work, The Women of Chateau Lafayette, which heralds the life of Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, and the successors to the family castle whose humanitarian spirit and courage equal those of Lafayette himself.
Registration for the Lafayette Symposium is now closed.
For those who cannot attend in person, the symposium will be available on Zoom through the Frederick
Historic Sites Consortium.
This Zoom link and ID/Code below will access the Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86890232352?pwd=fz5aOGkr6a7qVJIWCkgyE1BaYqkYwr.1
Meeting ID: 868 9023 2352
Passcode: 734952
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