Constitution Day Conf. 2025

Constitution Day Conference 2025

• The Sept. 10 session will examine Washington’s time as commander in chief of the Continental Army.
• The Sept. 17session will address Washington's statesmanship during the framing of the U.S. Constitution and the creation of the presidency.
• Overall, the conference will consider Washington's impact on how we govern ourselves today.

• 11 a.m.  |  Session 1 | Kevin Weddle Lecture | SB 134

 

• 2:30 p.m. | Session 2 | Panel Discussion with Nicholas Cole and Carson Holloway (Livestream only)
• 4 p.m. | Session 3 | Reonstructing the Authorial Origins of the Declaration of Independence | Holly Megson (Livestream only)

 

Presenters and Panelists

• Kevin J. Weddle | A distinguished military historian and the former Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College. He is a native Minnesotan, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and served more than 28 years on active duty in the U.S. Army before retiring as a colonel. His critically acclaimed book The Complete Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), earned six national and international literary awards including the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, and the Society of the Cincinnati Prize. He spent the 2024–2025 year as a research fellow at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and has previously been a fellow at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is completing a book on George Washington development as a military commander, Washington at War: The Making of a Commander in Chief.
• Nicholas Cole | A senior research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and director of the Quill Project (www.quill.pmb.ox.ac.uk). Quill examines how groups of people negotiate some of the most important texts that govern our societies and daily lives: constitutions, treaties, and legislation. The project's flagship work concerns the constitutional history of America, but it also examines British and European topics, such as the peace process in Northern Ireland. Dr. Cole studies American legal history, the development of modern political thought, the reception of the classics in the modern world, and the development of digital techniques and methods that can support humanities research. Before coming to Pembroke, he was a junior research fellow in history at St. Peter's College, and a departmental lecturer in American History for the history faculty.  He has also been a visiting Fellow at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia.
  
  Carson Holloway | A visiting fellow at Utah Valley University and a Washington Fellow at The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. His research focuses on American constitutionalism and the liberal nationalism of the American Founding. He is the Ralph Wardle Diamond Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is co-editor, with Bradford P. Wilson, of the two-volume work The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is also the author of Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration: Completing the Founding or Betraying the Founding? (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Review of Politics, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and Perspectives on Political Science, and he has written for The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The New Criterion, National Affairs, Law & Liberty, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and National Review. 
• Holly Megson | A senior documentary editor with the Quill Project at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. She is responsible for the current U.S. Constitutional projects in collaboration with Utah Valley University. Within this role she coordinates with faculty and student research assistants at UVU, oversees the National Archive grant projects and the upcoming Declaration of Independence project. Prior to joining Quill, she graduated from Pembroke College, University of Oxford, with a BA in History.