Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize Award & Reception

Please join us for a special evening in which Tamara Plakins Thornton will receive the 2017 Gomes Prize for Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a 19th-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life. Thornton will join MHS President and Dolley Madison biographer Catherine Allgor in a conversation about why historians become biographers. How do they pull off that transformation? Thornton and Allgor will explore what drew them to the life of a single individual after they had published “standard” historical monographs. They will address the sorts of novel challenges they faced as both scholars and writers— and the new intellectual pleasures they encountered.