Gabriel Weber
Staff Writer
When Thomas Jefferson placed two busts across from each other at Monticello — one colossal and one life-sized — of him and his political opponent, Alexander Hamilton, he would remark with a smile “opposed in life, as in death.”
“That showed that he viewed Hamilton not as a hated enemy to be destroyed, but as a respected opponent to be engaged with,” said Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center.
Offering both a creative and analytical lens to the week’s discussions, Rosen and Sabrina Lynn Motley, director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, will provide context on the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Nine theme “Past Informs Present: How to Harness History” at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.
Motley is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UCLA and has overseen several critically acclaimed exhibitions, while Rosen is a contributing editor of The Atlantic and professor of law at George Washington University Law School. Conducting research on the interplay between religious faith, doubt and social activism for her doctorate, Motley doesn’t just have experience in the study of humanity — but also the nuances of who has historically been considered human.
“The arc of time is long and not always linear, but history is a willing teacher. Over 50 years ago, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival was created as a corrective for a country fractured by racism, inequality, and war,“ Motley said in Salzburg Global. “Its founders wanted to make a point about who contributed, and was entitled, to the American promise. They understood that how we respond to the need to see and be seen, hear and be heard, would lead us to connection and healing or destruction and terror.”
The National Constitutional Center’s mission is to increase understanding of the Constitution among the American people. For Constitution Day on Sept. 17, the center will be releasing a free “America at 250” civic toolkit, in which leading historians like Gordon Wood, Danielle Allen, Robert George and more write about the big ideas of the Declaration of Independence; legal scholar Akhil Amar has even annotated the entire Declaration, clause by clause, to describe its historical antecedents.
Rosen was named as the 2025-26 Chautauqua Perry Fellow in Democracy, and is looking forward to using the opportunity to talk about the power of studying history. He will be releasing a book in October, titled The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America, that he’ll reference in today’s discussion.
“The book notes that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed from the beginning about how to balance liberty and power, but they were committed to civil dialogue about how to balance those principles,” Rosen said. “It’s so striking that at the end of his life, Jefferson put a bust of Hamilton across from his own in the entrance hall of Monticello.”
Formative debates on the balance between federal power and state rights; the executive branch versus Congress; or liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution are what have defined American politics. Rosen references Hamilton favoring his political rival Jefferson over Aaron Burr, whom Hamilton believed to be a demagogue; Hamilton ultimately lost his life in a duel to try and neutralize the threat of Burr, while Burr proved him right by seeking military aid from Great Britain the
same year.
“(Good dialogue involves) a shared commitment to sustaining the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration,” Rosen said.
Pointing out that the commitment to dialogue has been what has prevented the United States from descending into chaos, Rosen maintains that violence is the exception, rather than the rule, in America.
“We’re engaged in an important debate now about whether or not the constitutional system is being tested, and people disagree about that question itself,” Rosen said. “It’s too soon for historians to make a judgment about whether or not our current moment is unusual in resurrecting a fear of authoritarianism or within the historical cycle, which balances populism against its alternatives. That debate itself is necessary to have, and that’s why it’s so important to learn from history.”
Rosen, who is also the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America — which he discussed for the Chautauqua Lecture Series in 2024 — draws from the founders’ habits to inform how he lives his own life.
“The founders viewed happiness not as feeling good, but as being good — not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term virtue. By virtue, they meant character improvement and lifelong learning — using every day as an opportunity to learn and grow and cultivate your faculties through deep reading and deep learning. The takeaway for me from this project, which involved an unusual year of reading classical moral philosophy and waking up before sunrise, was just to change my daily reading habits,” Rosen said. “It’s been transformative.”
The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is an annually produced, international exposition of living cultural heritage that is provided free to the public. In identifying themes for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Motley intends to expand how people think about folk music and its power.
“One of the common denominators is trying to be relevant because of the way people think of folk and traditional arts as something old, dead, gone. There are a lot of ways those connect us to a shared humanity, and I don’t mean in a hyperbolic way,” Motley said to District Fray Magazine. “I really do think the interweaving of history, knowledge, skills and practice is something that’s very integral to what it means to be human.”
Overall, history provides a map on how to think about the present in an enlightened way.
“It’s just remarkable how much light history sheds on the present. It’s complicated. It’s messy,” Rosen said. “There’s no simple answer, but it’s incredibly empowering to see how America has faced these challenges before and to empower ourselves to make up our own mind today.”
