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Lunch at the Library: Uncovering a George Mason and George Washington Letter

George Mason and George Washington, engravings from the collections of New York Public Library and Mount Vernon

Join us for lunch and a compelling discussion with Kate Steir and Zoie Horecny, as they share insights into an unpublished 1768 letter from George Mason to George Washington. The previously unknown letter was discovered earlier this year and features a reply in Washington’s hand dated 1789.

This historic piece of correspondence, which will be on display during the event, sheds unexpected light on the private dealings and quiet tensions of these neighbors, while adding a new dimension to the complex personal and political relationship that existed between these two Founding Fathers. The Washington Library will also display documents from its collection which illustrate this historic relationship. 

This event is part of the Washington Library's Lunch at the Library series. Lunch will be provided.

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Kate Steir

Kate Steir is Senior Curator and Head of Collections at Gunston Hall. She has a PhD from Georgetown University in History and has been at Gunston Hall since 2021. Before coming to Gunston Hall, she held curatorial and educational roles at a variety of museums including the Boston Children’s Museum, the National Museum of American History, and Tudor Place Historic House and Garden. Her dissertation entitled “Provisions of Power: Food and Scarcity in Jamaica 1730-1790” focused on the politics of food scarcity and it’s relationship to slavery in the context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Dr. Steir's work as been published in numerous places including the blog for the National Museum of American History as well as in the American Historical Association's Perspectives, and she has been featured on several podcasts including Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant and The Tattooed Historian Show.

Zoie Horecny

Zoie Horecny is the Digital Washington Papers Editor at the Center for Digital History (CDH) at The George Washington Presidential Library. At the CDH, she works on projects related to the Washington Papers corpus such as Washington Day by Day and The Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington. Prior to joining the CDH, she contributed to the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesman Digital Edition (UVA). She earned her MA in Public History and PhD in Early American History at the University of South Carolina. Her scholarly work is on slavery in the Early Republic with a transatlantic focus, and this work has been published in Journal of the South Carolina Historical Association and Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.