West of the White House AFTER 1900: The Frontier and the American Presidency

Please join the Center for Presidential History and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies on October 16th and 17th for West of the White House: The Frontier and the American Presidency, a two night landmark symposium which marks the first sustained collaboration between the Center for Presidential History and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

The second night, October 17th, will focus on “The Frontier and the Presidency after 1900.” Moderated by Jeffrey Engel, SMU history professor and Director of the Center for Presidential History. Panelists include:

• T.J. Stiles (Pulitzer Prize winning independent scholar and author)
• Julie Reed (Penn State University)
• Ruth Lawlor (Cornell University)
• Aileen Teague (Texas A&M University)
• Augusta Dell’Omo (SMU, CPH Postdoctoral Fellow).

The question taken up by the conference participants is: What has been the relationship between the nation’s frontier and the American presidency? How, in other words, have U.S. presidents been shaped by events and crises occurring at the edge of the nation? And how, in turn, have presidents sought to extend executive power into these ever-shifting borderlands—where competing claims to sovereignty challenged the power of the American state—from the nation’s founding to the present? The historian Richard White has suggested that the American West of the late-nineteenth century functioned as “the kindergarten of the modern American state.” But, as this symposium will explore, the frontier has always been a place where Americans watched democracy develop, evolve, and on occasion, retreat. This is as true today as it was when in 1803 Thomas Jefferson added 828,000 square miles of territory to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, telling his cabinet, and by extension the entire nation, “I did this for your good.”

West of the White House assembles a roster of leading historians to examine the connections between the frontier and the American presidency. In ten incisive chapters, participants will consider the experiences of diverse groups of Americans not always found in the canon of past events, from Native Hawai’ian women at the turn of the twentieth century and Indigenous civil rights activists to impoverished miners in Civil War-era Colorado and Mexican immigrants intent on crossing the border to claim American citizenship during the Reagan Administration. Their actions—and the response of the Executive Branch—have shaped international conversations about sovereignty, spurred the creation of new legislation, and exposed the limits of federal power in ways that the nation continues to contend with today.

The event will start at 6 PM both evenings in Frances Anne Moody Hall Auditorium.

The theme of the symposium on the first night, October 16th, will be “The Frontier and the Presidency before 1900” and be moderated by Andrew Graybill, Professor of History at SMU. Panelists include Nicholas Guyatt (University of Cambridge), Khalil Anthony Johnson (Wesleyan University), Andrew Isenberg (University of Kansas), CPH Senior Fellow Cecily Zander (Texas Woman’s University and SMU), and Mallory Huard (Hood College).

The West of the White House symposium is cosponsored with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, and the DeGolyer Library.