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The Historical Society of Pennsylvania hosts the 2019 Founder’s Award Dinner on Friday, May 3, with the theme “Past, Present, and Future: The Quest for Equality.” Join us as we honor historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed with the Founder’s Award and historian and interim president and CEO of HSP Charles T. Cullen with the Heritage Award.

This special evening—HSP's biggest fundraiser of the year—will include a cocktail reception, dinner, and awards ceremony. The evening’s proceeds will support the preservation of HSP's collections. Business attire.

6:30 p.m. Reception

7:00 p.m. Dinner

8:00 p.m. Awards Ceremony and Conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed

10 p.m. Evening Concludes

About our honored guests

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and formerly the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2010-2016) and the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen's College, University of Oxford (2014-2015). She won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009), a subject she had previously written about in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia, 1997). She is also the author of Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010). Her most recently published book (with Peter S. Onuf) is “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.,>

Charles T. Cullen is completing a term as Interim President & CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a position he assumed on August 1, 2016. With a Ph.D. in legal history from the University of Virginia, he joined the history department at the College of William and Mary in 1970, and then moved to Princeton University in 1979. At the former, he became editor of the Papers of John Marshall, and at the latter the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, producing 12 volumes in those editions. At both projects he pioneered the use of computers in historical editing. In 1986 he accepted an appointment as President and Librarian of the Newberry Library in Chicago, a position he held until retiring in 2005. He continues his interest in Jefferson research and the use of computers in the humanities. After nine years as a member of the board of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, owner of Monticello, he continues today as a trustee emeritus.