NJCHE Annual Conference at Princeton University

Friday, December 1, 2023

The New Jersey Council for History Education is excited to announce that we will hold our annual conference on December 1, 2023 in person at Princeton University. 

Check back in September for the Registration Form

Confirmed speakers include:

• Sir David Cannadine, Dodge Professor of History, Princeton University
  Sir David Cannadine joined Princeton in the fall of 2008, having previously held positions at Cambridge, Columbia and London Universities. He is the author of twelve books, and the editor or co-editor of thirteen books, and his interests range widely across the economic, social, political and cultural history of modern Britain and its empire, capitalism, collecting and philanthropy in nineteenth and twentieth century America, and the history of history. His current projects include a study (and a questioning) of collective identities from religious wars to the ‘clash of civilizations’ and beyond; a new history of nineteenth-century Britain; a history of the teaching of history in schools in twentieth-century Britain; and a study of Winston Churchill, Anglo-America and the so-called ‘special relationship’. Sir David was recently knighted in the British New Year Honours List, he has served as a member of a committee set up by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to review the terms and conditions on which government papers are made publicly available; he is also Chairman of the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London, and Vice-Chair of the Editorial Board of Past & Present.
• Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian
  A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Stacy Schiff is the author of The Witches: Salem, 1692, which The New York Times hailed as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.” Joseph Ellis deemed Schiff’s the finest account to date of the witch trials; David McCullough declared the book “brilliant from start to finish.” Robert Massie said of the #1 bestseller: “This brilliant, compelling book is the most meticulously researched, effectively constructed, and beautifully written work I have read in a very long time.” Schiff’s previous book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010. As the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer put it, “Schiff does a rare thing: She gives us a book we’d miss if it didn’t exist.” The New Yorker termed the book “a work of literature;” Simon Winchester predicted “it will become a classic.” Ron Chernow may explain why: “Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence.” Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Brad Gooch has called her “perhaps the most seductive writer of nonfiction prose in America in our time.” Cleopatra appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. Also a #1 bestseller, Cleopatra was translated into 30 languages.Schiff is as well the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. Michael Douglas is set to star in an Apple TV series based on A Great Improvisation, to be written by Emmy Award-winner Kirk Ellis and directed by Emmy-award winner Tim Van Patten. Schiff has provided on-camera commentary for various documentaries, including Ken Burns’s 2022 Benjamin Franklin. Hailed as a “tour de force,” her most recent book, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, was named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Best 10 Books of 2022 and also figured on President Obama’s list of Best 10 Books of 2022.

  Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She received the 2019 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

• Dr. Jennifer Keene, Professor of History, Chapman University
  Jennifer D. Keene is a specialist in American military experience during World War I. She served as President of the Society of Military History 2018-2019. She has published three books on the American involvement in the First World War: Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America (2001), World War I: The American Soldier Experience (2011), and The United States and the First World War (2000). She is also the lead author for an American history textbook, Visions of America: A History of the United States that uses a visual approach to teaching students U.S. history. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards to France and Australia and Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship in International Studies. She served as an associate editor for the Encyclopedia of War and American Society (2005) which won the Society of Military History’s prize for best military history reference book. She co-edited, along with Michael Neiberg of Finding Common Ground: New Directions in First World War Studies (2011). In 2011 she won the Jack Miller Center Prize for the best military or diplomatic history essay published in Historically Speaking. She has published numerous essays and journal articles on the war, served as an historical consultant for exhibits and films, and as an associate editor of the Journal of First World War Studies. She is currently working on several projects related to the upcoming centennial of World War I, including a book on African American soldiers and a new synthesis of the American experience during the war under contract with Oxford University Press. She is also a general editor for the “1914-1918-online,” peer-reviewed online encyclopedia, a major digital humanities project.

Please click on the name of each historian above for their websites, which include biographies, publications, and curriculum vita. 

Details of each presentation will be posted shortly.