Playwright and memoirist R. Eric Thomas will be at the Rose O’ Neill Literary House on Oct. 17, presenting “Eric Reads the News: Writing Humor in Current Events.”

The free and public reading, part of the fall Literary House Series, will begin at 4:30 p.m., followed by a book sale and signing.

R. Eric Thomas

Thomas is a playwright and the host of The Moth in Philadelphia and D.C. He is also a senior staff writer for Elle.com where he writes a daily column. He won the 2016 Barrymore Award for Best New Play and the 2018 Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award. His debut memoir-in-essays, “Here For It,” will be published by Ballantine Books in 2020. Recent productions include “Mrs. Harrison” (Azuka Theater), which received a Barrymore nomination for Best New Play, and “Time is on Our Side” (About Face Theater & Simpatico Theater), which was a finalist for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. He has been commissioned by the National New Play Network, Arden Theater Company, Simpatico Theater, and Act II Playhouse.

For more information on this event or the Literary House, visit the website at www.washcoll.edu/centers/lithouse, or view the annual Literary Events Calendar brochure here: www.washcoll.edu/live/files/9229-2019-20-literary-events-brochure.

Washington College’s Department of Business Management will launch an ambitious new effort focused on student research and experiential opportunities thanks to a $1 million grant from a Warehime family foundation. The funding will create the Warehime Fund for Student Excellence in Business, which, when fully matured, will provide the department $50,000 a year to support student research, entrepreneurship, professional networking, and other initiatives to complement the department’s curricular offerings.

“It’s extraordinary, and we are so grateful to Beth Warehime and the foundation,” says Susan Vowels, chair and associate professor of business management. “Our goal from this gift is to provide the opportunity for every one of our students, whether in the major or the minors we offer, to participate in at least one of these experiences.”

Warehime ’13, who majored in business management with a minor in sociology, says choosing WC’s Department of Business Management was “a no-brainer … as one of our main focuses as a foundation is on education.”

“I’ve always valued my liberal arts education that I received from Washington College, and I do think it’s shaped me into the person I am today. Without the small classes, allowing for a great student/professor interaction, I would not have been able to customize elements of my education that enabled me to focus on my particular interests,” she says. “I had such an incredible experience during my four years as an undergrad, and I would love to be able to help others have that same experience.”

The Warehime Fund for Student Excellence in Business will support a variety of opportunities including:

– Funding advanced research techniques in senior capstone experiences (SCEs), such as performing primary research through surveys or interviews, traveling off-campus to learn first-hand about firms or business techniques, and using analytical tools on research databases;
– Establishing Warehime Fellows, students who will work closely with faculty mentors to produce high-quality academic research, with the aim of submitting their final products for publication in peer-reviewed journals;
– Funding student participation in academic and practitioner conferences to present research, network with professionals, and increase their knowledge of the latest in business theory and practice;
– Funding student participation in case competitions, experiential-learning focused activities such as Enactus team summits and national competitions;
– Funding of student pursuit of entrepreneurial projects outside of their SCE.

The business management major is one of the most popular at the College, with 165 students in the department in academic year 2018-2019, Vowels says. It already has distinctive hands-on programs including the Brown Advisory Student-Managed Investment Fund Program; offers minors in accounting, finance, international business, and marketing; contributes to the interdisciplinary communication and media studies major as well as interdisciplinary minors in data analytics and information systems, as well as the minor in arts management and entrepreneurship; and annually takes about two-dozen students abroad for the summer international business experience.

In addition, post-graduate partnerships with the College of William & Mary Mason School of Business and Loyola University Maryland provide paths for students seeking master’s degrees in accounting, as well as the Emerging Leaders MBA provided by Loyola University Maryland. Students who are business minors can also take advantage of a post-graduate partnership with Wake Forest University’s School of Business to pursue a master’s degree in management.

The grant will “help the department go to another level,” Vowels says, allowing flexible use of the money, rather than restricting funds to a single program. “The innovative part of this fund is that this will evolve as the curricular needs evolve, as student interests evolve, as the business world evolves, and as external opportunities evolve.” The research opportunities in particular are “a totally new piece. Now we will be able to provide students with funding if they want to do something extraordinary for their senior capstone, if they want to spend time with a particular firm, or need a special software package for their SCE.”

Vowels says the foundation’s goals and the College’s aligned perfectly in the emphasis on student experience.

“The foundation has the mission of impact, innovate, educate. So they are looking for innovative use of the funds they are providing to come up with substantive student impact. Their focus is on students, and that’s where the focus is for us as well.”

For the coming year, the department is working on planning to ensure “we are good stewards of this money,” Vowels says. By fall of 2020, students and faculty should be able to begin taking advantage of the new opportunities that the Warehime Fund for Student Excellence in Business will make possible.

About Washington College
Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Greg Farley, Washington College’s director of sustainability

Greg Farley, Washington College’s director of sustainability, will kick off WC’s fall 2019 lecture series in Talbot County on Sept. 5 with a discussion about sustainability and resiliency on the Eastern Shore and how local residents can help achieve it.

The talk at Talbot County Country Club begins at 6 p.m. and is co-sponsored by Washington College and Talbot Country Club. It is open to the public for a fee of $15, which includes a reception that begins at 5:30 p.m. Farley will discuss why sustainability and resilience are critical to the Eastern Shore — even more so than in most places — and how local residents can find inspiration and ideas in Washington College’s environmental initiatives for their own homes and businesses.

Farley is the first director of sustainability at Washington College, where he works alongside students, faculty, and staff to reduce Washington College’s impact on the global, regional, and local environments. He works on energy and sustainability strategies; management of waste, water, fuel, and electricity; and “greening” the 237-year-old campus. Previously he was professor of biological sciences and director of the Center for Leadership in Environmental Education at Chesapeake College, in Wye Mills. A biologist by training, he holds degrees from Duke University and Florida State University.

Farley’s talk is the first in a series scheduled throughout the fall: Bill Schindler, director of the Eastern Shore Food Lab, speaks on Oct. 3; and Caddie Putnam Rankin, assistant professor of business management, on Nov. 7.

All events are at 6142 Country Club Drive, Easton, Maryland. The $15 fee pays for the reception and admittance, and is payable by credit card or check to Talbot Country Club at the event. Washington College is not accepting payments. Please RSVP by Aug. 29 to Victoria Corcoran at 410-778-7805 or vcorcoran2@washcoll.edu.

About Washington College

Founded in 1782, Washington College is the 10th oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.

Seven books published in 2018 by the country’s most prominent historians have been named finalists for the 2019 George Washington Prize. The annual award recognizes the past year’s best written works on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of early American history.

“A gifted historian sheds light on the present as well as the past,” says Adam Goodheart, director of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, one of the prize’s three cosponsors. “Each of these seven authors helps illuminate a nation still struggling to understand and define itself after nearly two and a half centuries. We at Washington College—whose own history goes back to the nation’s founding—are pleased to honor them.”

Created in 2005 by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and Washington College, the $50,000 George Washington Prize is one of the nation’s largest and most notable literary awards. Written to engage a wide public audience, the books provide a “go-to” reading list for anyone interested in learning more about George Washington, his contemporaries, and the founding of the United States of America.

The 2019 George Washington Prize finalists are:

Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (Oxford University Press)

Stephen Fried, Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father (Crown)

Catherine Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America (Ballantine Books)

Joyce Lee Malcom, The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life (Pegasus Books)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Into the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking)

Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company)

Peter Stark, Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father (Harper Collins Publishers)

The winner of the 2019 prize will be announced, and all finalists recognized, at a black-tie gala on October 24, 2019, at The Union League Club in New York City. More information about the George Washington Prize is available atwww.mountvernon.org/gwprize.

The Books in Brief

The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation

Colin Calloway tells the fascinating story of Washington’s lifelong engagement with Native America. The book paints a new and, at times, disturbing portrait of the nation’s first president as an untested militia officer on the banks of the Ohio, as a diplomat who gradually learned to work with Indians on their own terms and, during his final years, as a disappointed Indian land speculator. Unusual for a Washington biography, Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many other native leaders, play leading roles in Calloway’s account. America’s first inhabitants, the book shows, were as central to the founding of the American republic as the nation’s first president.

Rush: Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father

Benjamin Rush comes alive in Stephen’s Fried’s biography of this versatile, multi-talented founder. Fried captures Rush’s ambition to better the world by founding hospitals and asylums, calling for the abolition of slavery, and championing public education. As the Continental army’s surgeon general, Rush pushed to reform battlefield medicine during the Revolutionary War, and he played a key role in the creation of the United States’ political system. In Fried’s skillful hands, we learn about Rush’s life as a devoted husband and father, as well as his lasting legacy for so many areas of the early American Republic.

Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

Catherine Kerrison tells the story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters, freeborn and enslaved. The first half focuses on the lives of Jefferson’s daughters by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, while the second part chronicles the difficult and precarious life of his third daughter, Harriet, born to his slave, Sally Hemmings. Well documented and powerfully told, Kerrison’s book is as much an account of America’s mixed and often-troubled heritage as it is about three strong women fighting to define their own destinies in a new nation.

The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life

Joyce Lee Malcolm writes a bracing account of America’s most famous traitor. Along with Arnold’s well-known frustrations as a Continental army officer, Malcolm recounts the story of his difficult childhood and his father’s descent into alcoholism and bankruptcy, which fed Arnold’s ambition as an adult. The book also takes a fresh look at Arnold’s lifelong hatred of France, dismissed by many scholars as a pretext for switching sides in 1780, but that Malcolm depicts as a genuine expression of attitudes that Arnold first acquired as a teenager in the Connecticut militia during the French and Indian War. Malcolm displays particular sensitivity in her treatment of the women in Arnold’s life: his heroic mother Hannah Waterman, his sister Hannah, and his second wife Peggy Shippen, whose life was destroyed by her husband’s treason.

Into the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown

Nathaniel Philbrick’s page-turning narrative describes the last and greatest American victory of the Revolutionary War. Philbrick gives the various global players at Yorktown their due, including the young nation’s French allies, who had their own complicated politics and motives, and the defeated British, but the book’s central character is George Washington. The American general’s insights, leadership, and attentiveness to his allies were instrumental in forcing the British to surrender. So too, the book suggests, was a dose of good fortune. Philbrick sheds new light on the often-misunderstood battle that finally secured American independence.

Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom

Russel Shorto studies the American struggle to define the meaning of individual freedom in his book that takes us to America’s founding and weaves together the stories of six individuals whose very lives test a philosophical idea through the force of action and sometimes violent change. From the story of an African who liberated himself and his family from American slavery, to the exploits of George Washington during and after the American revolt, Revolution Song is a wide-ranging, gripping history of a people trying to define what it means to be free.

Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father

Peter Stark recounts the drama of George Washington’s formative years during the 1750s fighting the French and their Indian allies in the Ohio Valley. Mortified by his initial encounter with a mixed-race French-Seneca officer in western Pennsylvania, Washington worked to master the ways of his European and native foes, and eventually, Starks shows, of the British soldiers, allied Indians, Tidewater gentry, frontier squatters, and imperial politicians whose help he needed if he was to realize his own ambitions. By the time he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759 and moved to Mount Vernon, Washington had perfected the chameleon-like ability to adapt to his surroundings that would define the rest of his storied career. The wilderness, Stark shows, is where Washington became the leader we remember today.

The Sponsors of the George Washington Prize

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Founded in 1994 by visionaries and lifelong proponents of American history education Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is the leading American history nonprofit organization dedicated to K-12 education. With a focus on primary sources, the Gilder Lehrman Institute illuminates the stories, people and moments that inspire students of all ages and backgrounds to learn and understand more about history. Through a diverse portfolio of education programs, including the acclaimed Hamilton Education Program, the Gilder Lehrman Institute provides opportunities for nearly two million students, 30,000 teachers and 16,000 schools worldwide. Learn more at gilderlehrman.org

George Washington’s Mount Vernon
Since 1860, more than 85 million visitors have made George Washington’s Mount Vernon the most popular historic home in America. Through thought-provoking tours, entertaining events, and stimulating educational programs on the estate and in classrooms across the nation, Mount Vernon strives to preserve George Washington’s place in history as “First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of His Countrymen.” Mount Vernon is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s oldest national preservation organization, founded in 1853. In 2013, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association opened the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, which safeguards original books and manuscripts and serves as a center for research, scholarship, and leadership development.  Learn more at mountvernon.org

Washington College
Washington College was founded in 1782 as the first institution of higher learning established in the new republic. George Washington was not only a principal donor to the college, but also a member of its original governing board. He received an honorary degree from the college in June 1789, two months after assuming the presidency. The College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience explores the American experience in all its diversity and complexity, seeks creative approaches to illuminating the past, and inspires thoughtful conversation informed by history. Learn more at www.washcoll.edu.

Bill Schindler, director of Washington College’s Eastern Shore Food Lab, will be the speaker at an event in Easton on June 19 presented by The Aspen Institute Wye Fellows and Washington College. Sponsored by Out of the Fire restaurant, “Food Evolution Revolution: The Cutting-Edge Fusion of Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Modern Kitchen,” will challenge contemporary notions of food systems and encourage people to rethink our historical relationship with food.

The program, which is free and open to the public, will be at the Temple B’nai Israel, 7199 Tristan Dr., in Easton. Doors will open at 6 p.m., with light refreshments, and the program will begin at 6:30. While the event is free, registration is requested here: http://as.pn/foodrevolution

Eastern Shore Food Lab Director Bill Schindler

Schindler, who teaches in Washington College’s Department of Anthropology, is also the director of the College’s new Eastern Shore Food Lab. He is known worldwide for his expertise in primitive and ancestral technologies, and National Geographic Channel chose him to co-star in its reality series on human evolution called “The Great Human Race.” More recently, he has traveled the world studying traditional and ancestral foodways to learn as much as possible about how to transform our food systems by fusing the most cutting-edge, insightful processing technologies in food today with his deep understanding of our three-and-a-half-million-year dietary past.

The Eastern Shore Food Lab is now the crucible of these efforts. In this a one-of-a-kind teaching and learning space, Schindler is drawing international chefs and food innovators to rethink our food systems by using primitive and ancestral food knowledge and technologies to create food for today’s palate that is more nutritious, meaningful, and sustainable. He calls it “learning to eat like humans again.”

In the program “Food Evolution Revolution: The Cutting-Edge Fusion of Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Modern Kitchen,” Schindler will discuss the role that technology played in our dietary past, and how far our food systems have strayed from our species’ history of creating technologies to maximize food’s nutritional value. By fusing lessons from our dietary past with modern culinary techniques, Schindler believes we can create a food system that is meaningful, accessible, relevant, and delectable.

About the Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to foster leadership based on enduring values and to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues. The Aspen Institute has earned a reputation for gathering diverse thought leaders, creatives, scholars, and members of the public to address some of the world’s most complex problems. The Aspen Wye Fellows is a group of Chesapeake Bay area residents who share the Aspen Institute’s interest in global dialogue and who play a key role in sustaining the Institute’s mission. Learn more at www.aspeninstitute.org  For information on Wye Fellows membership contact Susan Langfitt, Manager of Aspen Wye Fellows, at susan.langfitt@aspeninstitute.org or call 410-820-5375.

About Out of the Fire
Out of the Fire in Easton, Maryland, is restaurant whose owners’ passion for food and community is reflected in every dish we serve. We are driven by the pursuit of supporting those who engage in social and environmental stewardship. We believe that the combination of awareness and knowledge are a powerful catalyst for a vibrant community.

About Washington College
Founded in 1782, Washington College is the tenth oldest college in the nation and the first chartered under the new Republic. It enrolls approximately 1,450 undergraduates from more than 39 states and territories and 25 nations. With an emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning in the arts and sciences, and more than 40 multidisciplinary areas of study, the College is home to nationally recognized academic centers in the environment, history, and writing. Learn more at washcoll.edu.