There are other states, like Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, and New York, that have campaigns going on to increase civic education in state school systems. Everybody across the United States should learn more about what those programs are in their individual states.
There are also national programs occurring. iCivics is leading one called “Educating for American Democracy.” It is a program looking at establishing a national model of civic education.
There are so many different ways to participate. I tell people it is not just simply politics. There are ways of participating in your community that involve service in so many different ways. You do not have to be a political figure. You just have to be a person who cares.
DR: My final question is this. Suppose somebody says, “I want to be Sonia Sotomayor when I grow up. I want to be a leader. I want to be a great justice.” What are the one or two attributes that you would recommend to young women and young men that they develop if they really want to become a leader as they get older?
SS: Passion. That is the first quality. To become a leader, you have to show people that you care deeply about things. People only follow those they think are passionate. So you have to possess passion and, second, commitment driven by dedication and hard work. You do not get anywhere unless you work hard.
I tell kids all the time, “Think of every sports athlete that you admire. They did not wake up a star. They had to work at it. Every basketball star you know has been on the court for hours, days, months, and years, practicing that throw shot.” You have to work hard to achieve anything in this life. You have to have perseverance and dedication and a sense of commitment to working hard, to doing things right.
About the Contributors
MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT is a professor, author, diplomat, and businesswoman who served as the sixty-fourth secretary of state of the United States. In 1997, she was named the first female secretary of state and became, at that time, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Albright served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations and was a member of the president’s cabinet. She is a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Dr. Albright is chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, and chair of Albright Capital Management LLC, an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. She also chairs the National Democratic Institute and is honorary chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council. In 2012, she was chosen by President Obama to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in recognition of her contributions to international peace and democracy. Dr. Albright is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book, Hell and Other Destinations, was published in April 2020. Her other books include Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003) and Fascism: A Warning (2018).
DANIELLE S. ALLEN is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is a political philosopher and public policy expert who focuses on democracy innovation, public health and health equity, justice reform, education, and political economy. She also directs the Democratic Knowledge Project, a K-16 civic education provider. Her books include Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Eequality, Cuz: An American Tragedy, and Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. She has chaired numerous commission processes and is a lead author on influential policy road maps, including Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion, Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience, Pandemic Resilience: Getting It Done, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, and Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners K-12. She was for many years a contributing columnist for the Washington Post and writes for the Atlantic.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS is an award-winning historian, scholar of leadership, and best-selling author of ten books, most recently the acclaimed New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller Presidents of War. Beschloss appears regularly on television as the NBC News presidential historian and as a contributor to the PBS NewsHour. He has also been a contributing columnist to the New York Times. He has won an Emmy for his television work and received six honorary degrees and numerous other awards. He has the largest Twitter following of any American historian, more than half a million. Born in Chicago, Beschloss is an alumnus of Phillips Academy (Andover) and Williams College, where he studied under James MacGregor Burns, author of what remains the classic book on leadership. At the Harvard Business School, Beschloss studied leadership in both the private and public sectors. He has served as a historian at the Smithsonian, a scholar at the University of Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Annenberg Foundation. Among his earlier books are two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s secret tapes; The Conquerors, about Franklin Roosevelt, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust; and Presidential Courage. He is also coauthor (with Caroline Kennedy) of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.
DAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other publications. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction era at Yale is online at oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119. Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Blight maintains a website including information about public lectures, books, articles, and interviews at www.davidwblight.com.
MARK BRADFORD is a contemporary artist known for his large-scale abstract paintings created out of paper. Characterized by its layered formal, material, and conceptual complexity, his work explores social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations. After accumulating layers of various types of paper onto canvas, Bradford excavates their surfaces using power tools to explore economic and social structures that define contemporary subjects. His practice includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, printmaking, and other media. In addition to his studio practice, Bradford engages in social projects alongside exhibitions of his work that bring contemporary ideas outside the walls of exhibition spaces and into communities with limited exposure to art. Bradford received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1995 and his MFA from CalArts in 1997. He has since been widely exhibited internationally and received numerous awards. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Hauser & Wirth, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai.
CATHERINE BREKUS is Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and American culture, with particular emphasis on the history of women, gender, Christianity, and the evangelical movement. She is the author of many articles and books, including Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845, which explores the rise of female preaching during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, which argues that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue with the Enlightenment. A companion volume, Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings, is a critical edition of some of Osborn’s eighteenth-c
entury manuscripts. Brekus is also the editor of The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, a collection of essays that asks how women’s history changes our understanding of American religion, and the coeditor (with W. Clark Gilpin) of American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, an introduction to the multiple forms of Christian expression in the United States. Brekus has received several awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Luce III Faculty Fellowship in Theology, and a Pew Faculty Fellowship in Religion and American History.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, the CNN presidential historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards, museums, colleges, and historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley their official U.S. presidential historian. His book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize, while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has received a Grammy Award for Presidential Suite and seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume annotated The Nixon Tapes won the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize. His most recent book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, was a New York Times best-seller. He is a member of the Century Association, Council of Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.
KEN BURNS has been making documentary films for more than forty years. Since the Academy Award–nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jackie Robinson, The Vietnam War, and Country Music. Future film projects include Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin, The Holocaust and the United States, The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, and LBJ & the Great Society, among others. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations; and in September 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
FRANCIS S. COLLINS, MD, PhD, was appointed the sixteenth director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate. In 2017, President Donald Trump asked Dr. Collins to continue to serve as the NIH director. President Joe Biden did the same in 2021. Dr. Collins is the only presidentially appointed NIH director to serve more than one administration. In this role, Dr. Collins oversees the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research. Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993 to 2008. Dr. Collins is an elected member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007, and received the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2020, he was named the fiftieth winner of the Templeton Prize, which celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity.
PHILIP J. DELORIA is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017) with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two coedited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria received a PhD in American studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is former president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions, and will serve as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2022.
LILLIAN FADERMAN is the author of several award-winning books of lesbian, gay, and LGBTQ history, including Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, and Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death. Her memoir, Naked in the Promised Land, was reissued by Bloomsbury Press in 2020.
DREW GILPIN FAUST is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. Faust was the founding dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001–2007). Before coming to Radcliffe, she was the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the faculty for twenty-five years. She is the author of six books, including most recently This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), which was awarded the 2009 Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s 2009 American History Book Prize, and was recognized by the New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” Faust is a contributing writer at the Atlantic. Her honors include awards for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored more than twenty books and created more than twenty documentary films, including The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross; Black in Latin America; Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise; Africa’s Great Civilizations; Reconstruction: America After the Civil War; The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song; and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series on PBS. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “Genius Grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his BA in history from Yale University in 1973 and his MA and PhD in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, and the Brookings Institution.
DONALD E. GRAHAM has been the chairman of the board of the Graham Holdings Company (previously the Washington Post Company) since 1993. He was chief executive officer of the company from May 1991 until November 2015. He was publisher of the Washington Post newspaper from January 1979 until September 2000. Graham was born on April 22, 1945, in Baltimore, Maryland, a son of Philip L. and Katharine Meyer Graham. After graduating from college in 1966, Graham was drafted and served as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He wa
s a patrolman with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department from January 1969 to June 1970. Graham joined the Washington Post newspaper in 1971 as a reporter. He is a cofounder of TheDream.US, the largest national scholarship fund for Dreamers. Previously, he served as chairman of the District of Columbia College Access Program. He remains a member of the DC-CAP board. DC-CAP has assisted more than 23,000 D.C. students enroll in college and has provided scholarships totaling more than $33 million. Graham is a trustee of the Federal City Council and Gates Policy Initiative.
WALTER ISAACSON, a professor of history at Tulane University, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.
JACK JACOBS received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rutgers University and served in the U.S. Army for twenty years, retiring as a colonel. For his actions in Vietnam, he was awarded three Bronze Stars, two Silver Stars, and the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest combat decoration. After retiring from the army, he founded a securitization firm, subsequently sold to Key Bank, and he was a managing director of Bankers Trust, where he ran foreign exchange options, and, subsequently, of Lehman Brothers, where he established an institutional hedge fund business. He is an on-air analyst for NBC News and MSNBC and serves on a number of corporate and charity boards. His memoir, If Not Now, When?, won a Colby Award, and he was an executive producer of the series Ten Weeks, which will appear on Hulu.
BILLIE JEAN KING was named one of the “100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century” by Life magazine and is a 2009 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She is the founder of the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, founder of the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation, and part of the ownership group of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Los Angeles Sparks, and Angel City FC. In September 2020, King became the first woman to have an annual global team sports event named in her honor when Fed Cup, the women’s world cup of tennis, was rebranded as the Billie Jean King Cup. The National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open, was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006 in honor of her accomplishments on and off the court. King serves on the board of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is an Adidas Global Ambassador, and is a past member of the board of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and a past member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. Her memoir, All In: An Autobiography, was published by Knopf in August 2021.
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