I’m attending this year’s meeting of The Historical Society, to be held in Columbia, SC, on May31-June 2. It’s my first time to be part of this conference, and I’m looking forward to meeting several people I know virtually.
The conference theme is “Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils.” In keeping with the theme, I entitled my presentation “Old Hickory Just Got All Sexypants: History and Politics in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” (.pdf linked here).* I wrote it as a presentation, so a lot of the “meat” is in the footnotes and will be mentioned as I’m talking. This is the first time I’ve written a conference paper specifically as a presentation, so we’ll see how it turns out.
* Just a caution: The paper contains adult language that I quote from the Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson soundtrack. I vacillated over whether to include the profanity in the paper but decided to go ahead because I think the value of the language in conveying the play’s themes trumps professional decorum in this particular case.
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics 