Episode 4: Die Hard with Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed and Dr. Craig Bruce Smith
We all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but is it a history movie? This week we're talking to two of the most prominent historians of the Early American Republic to get to the bottom of the debates. You're gonna love where this goes.
Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed is an American law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, where she is also a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences.
Gordon-Reed is noted for transforming scholarship on Thomas Jefferson, particularly regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2008 for her groundbreaking work on the Hemings family of Monticello. In 2010, she received the National Humanities Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the MacArthur “Genius Award.”
Since 2018, she has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. Gordon-Reed’s contributions to historical scholarship and her dedication to uncovering and presenting the complexities of American history have made her a prominent and influential figure in both academic and public spheres.
Dr. Craig Bruce Smith is professor of history at National Defense University in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS) in Norfolk, VA. He authored American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era and co-authored George Washington’s Lessons in Ethical Leadership.
Smith earned his PhD in American history from Brandeis University. Previously, he was an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an assistant professor of history, and the director of the history program at William Woods University, and he has taught at additional colleges, including Tufts University.
He specializes in American Revolutionary and early American history, specifically focusing on George Washington, honor, ethics, war, the founders, transnational ideas, and national identity. In addition, he has broader interests in colonial America, the early republic, leadership, and early American cultural, intellectual, and political history.