Header Image: Washington Delivering His Inaugural Address April 1789, In The Old City Hall, New-York,
steel engraving by Henry S. Sadd, after Tomkins Harrison Matteson, 1849. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
About Stephanie Lawton
Lawton is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia and earned her B.A. in history at UCLA where she studied American and Roman history. She has interned for several public and digital history organizations including the Civil War Trust, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Her current dissertation investigates how participants in presidential funeral ceremonies used the historical memory of Ancient Greece and Rome to define the ideal American citizen, to legitimize and build a national community, and to predict its prosperity or destruction amid partisan disputes.