Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Rescheduled: Cokie Roberts Presents 'Shaping a Nation' a Talk about Women in Politics at Washington College

New Date: February 17

Chestertown, MD — It's startling now, when we've had women on the Supreme Court, a female Speaker of the House, women in the Cabinet, and a woman who nearly made it to the Presidency, to remember that, until very recently, women had little presence in the official corridors of power.

Yet women have exerted their influence on politics since our nation's beginning. In her best-selling books, Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty, ABC News and National Public Radio political analyst Cokie Roberts brings to life the extraordinary women who helped create the young United States of America. Roberts will share their stories and discuss more recent political events in "Shaping a Nation, Then and Now: A Conversation with Cokie Roberts" at Washington College's Casey Academic Center Forum on Tuesday, February 17, at 7:30 p.m.

"If we don't know what the women were up to at the time of the fight for independence and the founding of our country, we're missing half our history," Roberts told Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, after she'd published Founding Mothers. "Not only are we missing half our story, we're leaving out a part of history that is incredibly inspiring to girls and young women."

As a political journalist who grew up in Washington in the 1940s and 1950s, Cokie Roberts says she has long been interested in "the influence of women like my mother—married to Hale Boggs, my father, who had come to Congress when he was 26 and she was 24 back in 1941—and then the women that she associated with, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, Mrs. Albert Gore and Mrs. Gerald Ford. They were very influential in the community of Washington itself, working alongside the African American women who were here, and extremely influential in their husbands' campaigns and careers."

An award-winning journalist, Cokie Roberts has long been a familiar voice on National Public Radio, where she was the Congressional correspondent for more than 10 years and is now a senior news analyst. She was co-anchor of the popular weekly ABC interview program, "This Week with Sam Donaldson & Cokie Roberts," from 1996 to 2002. As chief congressional analyst for ABC News, she covered politics, Congress and public policy, providing reportage for "World News Tonight" and other ABC News broadcasts. With her husband, Steven V. Roberts, also a journalist, she writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column and is a contributing editor to USA Weekend. Together, they also wrote From This Day Forward, a book about their marriage and other marriages in American history.

Admission to "Shaping a Nation, Then and Now: A Conversation with Cokie Roberts," is free and open to the public. For more information, call 410/810-7161.

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, visit http://starrcenter.washcoll.edu.

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