Featured FLARE Member

(Each month we will feature a FLARE member who is making news

and educating the public about the lives and legacies of America’s first ladies.)

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FLARE Members Host Roundtable - Teaching Women in War: From the White House to the Women's Army Corps

FLARE Members Host Roundtable - Teaching Women in War: From the White House to the Women's Army Corps

So It Seems, Audiences Demand Encores When It Comes to First Ladies

So It Seems, Audiences Demand Encores When It Comes to First Ladies

FLARE congratulates Heath Hardage Lee for for the Plutarch Award

FLARE congratulates Heath Hardage Lee for for the Plutarch Award

Pat Nixon's Biography The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon

FLARE Member Karen Dunak Announces A New Book on Jacqueline Kennedy

FLARE Member Karen Dunak Announces A New Book on Jacqueline Kennedy

A new book on Jacqueline Kennedy by FLARE member Karen Dunak appeared in East Wing Magazine.

FLARE Board Member Nichola Gutgold's Interview on First Lady Fashion

FLARE Board Member Nichola Gutgold's Interview on First Lady Fashion

Many first lady scholars are asking to comment on the inauguration. FLARE Board Member Nichola Gutgold was recently interviewed about fashion.

Smithsonian Scholars Select Remember the First Ladies as a Best Book of 2024

Smithsonian Scholars Select Remember the First Ladies as a Best Book of 2024

Remember the First Ladies: The Legacies of America's History-Making Women by FLARE founding members Diana B. Carlin, Anita B. McBride, and Nancy Kegan Smith was selected by Smithsonian Scholars as a best book of 2024.More Info >

First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE) Announces Allida Black, Ph.D., as the 2024 Lewis L. Gould Award Recipient

First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE) Announces Allida Black, Ph.D., as the 2024 Lewis L. Gould Award Recipient

Allida Black, Ph.D., today received the 2024 Lewis L. Gould Award. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute of the University of Oxford, Special Adviser and Historian to former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Managing Director of the Allenswood Group, LLC, a collaborative she founded to strengthen democracy through education and civic engagement and to preserve women’s political history.

FLARE Members in the News

Catherine Allgor

Rebecca Boggs Roberts

Diana B. Carlin

Stacy Cordery

East Wing Magazine

Lewis Gould

Nichola D. Gutgold

Myra G. Gutin

Jill Hummer

Katherine Jellison

Michael LaRosa

Heath Hardage Lee

Anita B. McBride

Lisa McCubbin Hill

Elizabeth J. Natalle

Barbara Perry

Colleen Shogan

Katherine A. S. Sibley

Nancy Kegan Smith

Tammy Vigil

Molly Meijer Wertheimer

Jeanne Ryan Wolfson

Previously Featured FLARE Members

Colleen Shogan

Lisa McMcCubbin Hill

Nancy Kegan Smith

Rebecca Boggs Roberts

FLARE ... Why Haven’t We Learned This Before?

FLARE 2023 Election Results

January 2024 FLARE Members in the News

Remember the First Ladies

On This Day: FLARE Asserts the Importance of Studying Presidential First Ladies

Catherine Allgor

As the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society Catherine Allgor is a noted historian, non-profit leader, and public history innovator. Previously, she had been the Nadine and Robert Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, and a former Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside.

Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins Scholar and received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation received a prize as the best dissertation in American History at Yale and The Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in U.S. Women's History. She began her teaching career at Simmons College and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University.

Her first book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia, 2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Annual Book Award. Her political biography, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Henry Holt, 2006), was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In 2012, she published Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (Westview Press) and The Queen of America: Mary Cutts's Life of Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press).

President Obama has appointed Allgor to a presidential commission, The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. Catherine Allgor also serves on boards and committees for the National Women’s History Museum, the Organization of American Historians, Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, among others.

Dr. Allgor's first lady expertise is on Dolley Madison and Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams.

Stacy A. Cordery

As professor of History at Iowa State University, Stacy A. Cordery an award-winning teacher, respected author, and popular talking head. Before moving to Ames in 2016 she served as professor and chair of the History Department at Monmouth College, where she won the institution’s only teaching award a record four times. Last academic year, she was the Dennis and Vaune Johnson Endowed Chair in Theodore Roosevelt Studies and the director of the TR Honors Leadership Program at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, North Dakota.

Cordery earned her doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked with Lewis L. Gould, the founder of the modern study of First Ladies. As an undergraduate she took the first university-level course on First Ladies, taught by Gould, and did research on Eleanor Roosevelt and Anna Pennybacker, locating previously unknown correspondence between the two in the American Research Center at UT. Her dissertation on the life of Alice Roosevelt Longworth formed the basis for her biography, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (Viking Books, 2007), a New York Times Notable Book.

She is also the author of Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts (Viking, 2012) and two books about Theodore Roosevelt. She has spoken at the White House Historical Association’s Presidential Sites Summit, the Wilson Center, the Jefferson Educational Forum, the National Constitution Center, the Miller Center, Printers Row Lit Fest, and the Savannah Book Festival. Her media appearances include C-SPAN, CNN, the Diane Rehm Show, and National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. She was recently featured on the History Channel’s two-part miniseries on Theodore Roosevelt and on the Smithsonian Channel’s television series “First Ladies Revealed” speaking about Edith Roosevelt in the White House. She is currently under contract with Viking/Penguin for a biography of American entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, whose clients included Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy.

For eighteen years, Dr. Cordery served as the web bibliographer for the National First Ladies Library. Her first lady expertise is on First Ladies of the Progressive Era, especially Edith Kermit Roosevelt. For more information, please see www.stacycordery.com.

Lewis L. Gould

Lewis L. Gould, the Eugene Barker Centennial Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Texas-Austin, has been named the inaugural recipient of an award that recognizes distinguished contributions to research and education about America’s first ladies. The award, which will be named for Prof. Gould, was announced today by the First Ladies Association for Research and Education (FLARE).

FLARE’s founding president and first lady scholar, Myra Gutin, said this of Gould’s influence on the field: "Dr. Lewis L. Gould's pioneering work opened the door to the development of a new discipline, the study of the first lady. He encouraged and inspired a generation of scholars and others interested in the presidential spouse to research and then share what they had learned with the American public. He has been our guiding light."

The award was presented to Prof. Gould during a special virtual ceremony on June 10, 2021 (Lewis L. Gould Award Ceremony - YouTube). In receiving the award, Gould said: “The launching of FLARE is a welcome development to all of us who have followed the history of First Ladies over the past four decades. Intensive study of these important women can now go forward. I am deeply honored both in the name of the award and the choice of the first recipient.”

For more than forty years, Prof. Gould has been a pioneer in the study of the wives of America’s Presidents. He was the first to develop a university-level course on the history and legacies of America’s first ladies at the University of Texas-Austin in 1982. Two years later he was the keynote speaker at the first national first ladies conference, convened by Mrs. Betty Ford. He has authored more than a dozen books, including The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, The Modern American Presidency, Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment, and American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacies. His book that analyzed Lady Bird Johnson’s contribution to environmentalism was the first attempt to demonstrate a first lady’s impact on the American society. In 1998, Gould became the editor for the Modern First Ladies series published by the University Press of Kansas.

Myra G. Gutin, Ph.D.

Elizabeth J. Natalle

Barbara Perry

Dr. Tammy R. Vigil

News