2026 LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Symposium

Sarah Botstein is an award-winning filmmaker and the co-director and producer of Florentine Films’ The American Revolution. An Emmy award-winning producer of multiple documentary films about American history, life, and culture for more than two decades, Botstein’s work includes some of the most acclaimed and popular programming on PBS, including: The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), Hemingway (2020), College Behind Bars (2019), The Vietnam War (2017), Prohibition (2011), The War (2007) and Jazz (2001).

Botstein works closely with PBS Learning Media to develop educational materials as part of the Ken Burns Classroom, and she was an original contributor to UNUM, a digital platform providing historical context for contemporary issues.

She holds a degree in American Studies from Barnard College/Columbia University. She is currently working on a three-part series about Lyndon B. Johnson slated for broadcast in 2028.

Currently a Gibson Fellow in Democracy at the Karsh Institute of Democracy, Dr. Duval is a historian of early North America, the Atlantic world, and women’s and gender history. She is the author of The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (2025). An article based on this project won awards from the William and Mary Quarterly and the Coordinating Council for Women in History. She has won fellowships to support her work from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She is currently writing about motherhood during the American Revolution.

A historian of colonial North America, the early Republic, and westward expansion, Dr. Taylor has written a dozen books, including his most recent work, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 (2024). He has won numerous awards for his books. His second book, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995), won the Bancroft Prize, Beveridge Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013) won the Pulitzer Prize and Merle Curti Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the George Washington Book Prize.

The Vice President of the American Historical Association’s Teaching Division, former president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic, and former editorial board member for the Journal of American History, Dr. Zabin has won fellowships from the Huntington Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies. Her most recent book, The Boston Massacre: A Family History (2020), won the Journal of the American Revolution prize. She is also the author of Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (2009) and The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden’s “Journal of the Proceedings” (2004).

A historian of race and politics in early America, Dr. Egerton has written nine books about the Revolutionary era, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and slave rebellions. He has held invited positions at Cornell University and at University College Dublin. Among his books, Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (2016) won the Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize, while Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America (2019) was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. His most recent book is A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2024).

An historian of eighteenth-century America, Dr. Glover’s recent books include Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (2014), The Fate of the Revolution: Virginians Debate the Constitution (2016), Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution (2020), which won the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Biography Prize and the Rogers Prize from the South Carolina Historical Society, and the edited volume, The Gendered Republic: Reimagining Identity in the New Nation (2025). Glover has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and the Southern Historical Association.

Dr. Herrera is Senior Historian at the George Washington Leadership Institute, an Asness Fellow at The National World War II Museum’s Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, and a retired Professor of Military History at the US Army War College. He has won writing awards from the Society for Military History and the Army Historical Foundation. His first book was For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 (2015). His most recent book, Feeding Washington’s Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (2022) was short-listed for the American Battlefield Trust Book Prize for History.

An award-winning historian of the American Revolution, Dr. Holton examines how the era framed the nation’s economics and the experiences of ordinary people, including African Americans, Native Americans, and women. A Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he most recently co-authored Give Me Liberty: Virginia & The Forging of a Nation (2025). His prior books include Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (2021); Abigail Adams (2009), which won the Bancroft Prize; and Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the National Book Award.

A historian of American history between 1750 and 1877, Dr. Bell’s most recent book is The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (2025). He is also the author of Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home (2019), a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize, as well as We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States (2012). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and Cambridge University. The University System of Maryland awarded him its highest award for teaching.

An award-winning historian of the British empire, slavery and abolition, and the Age of Revolutions, he has written on abolitionism and British Africa during the American Revolution. His first book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), won the James A. Rawley and Morris D. Forkosch Prizes from the American Historical Association, as well as the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center. He also co-edited Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the Modern Age (2006) and has been a Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance and at the Huntington Library.

A historian of American independence, French-US relations, the Atlantic world, and the Age of Enlightenment, Dr. de Rode began her career in France, where her first book won the Prix Guizot from the Académie Française. She is currently writing “En Route to Revolution.” She has won numerous fellowships, including awards from Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the American Philosophical Society. She is engaged in public history initiatives about the American Revolution with the National Park Service, the Washington Rochambeau Revolutionary Route Association, the Philadelphia Museum of the American Revolution, Mount Vernon, and the French embassy in Washington, DC.

A historian of early America, the African Diaspora, and Haiti, as well as the co-editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, Dr. Johnson has written widely on Black internationalism and diplomacy. He is the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (2014); co-editor of In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2021); and, most recently, the author of Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution (2025). He is currently writing a book about the US and Haitian constitutions.