Brown Bag Lunch: American Prime Meridian
Learn about Library Fellow James E. Lewis’s research project, American Prime: Why Americans Desired, Adopted, and Abandoned Their Own Prime Meridian. In writing his latest book, American Prime, Lewis is using resources at Mount Vernon that helps amplify the importance of the Prime Meridian in the 18th and 19th centuries and why the American people felt like it was so essential to establish a new Prime Meridian with their independence.
James E. Lewis Jr. is a Professor of History at Kalamazoo College, where he has been teaching for more than twenty years. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Virginia. In addition to a number of essays in collected works, he is the author of four books: The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood (UNC, 1998); John Quincy Adams: Policymaker for the Union (SR Books, 2001); The Louisiana Purchase (Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2003); and The Burr Conspiracy (Princeton, 2017). The Burr Conspiracy was long-listed or a finalist for a number of prestigious awards, including the George Washington Prize (2018). His current project concerns the troubled history of the American prime meridian between the 1780s and the 1880s.
This talk is part of the Brown Bag Lunch series hosted at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and was recorded October 8, 2024.