Speakers

Dr. Pearl T. Ponce was appointed the Director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in June 2024. Before joining the National Archives and Record Administration (a federal agency), she was a college professor, teaching at Ithaca College for 17 years and chairing her department for six. She earned an MA and Ph.D. in History from Harvard University; an MA in History as well as a certificate in Contemporary History from Ohio University; and a BA in International Relations from Pomona College. A political and diplomatic historian of the United States, her specialty is in the Coming of the Civil War Era. She is the author of “To Govern the Devil in Hell”: The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas and editor of Kansas’s War: The Civil War in Documents. Her main research interests have centered around the presidency; governance and democracy; the exercise of federal power; and the territorial system. Her latest project, “A Strange System of Terrorism”: Federal Power and the Fraying of Democracy in Utah, Washington, and Kansas Territories in the 1850s, brings these threads together.