LEXINGTON, Va. Sept. 3, 2024 — Virginia Military Institute will hold a Constitution Day commemoration Thursday, Sept. 19 at 8 p.m. in Marshall Hall’s Gillis Theater on post. The discussion will focus on the theme, “The Election of 1824 and the History of Contested Presidential Elections,” and will use the extraordinary presidential election of 1824 as a jumping off point for a broader discussion of the constitutional changes and challenges related to presidential elections. 

Guest speakers are Michael E. Woods, professor of history and director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, and Reeve Huston, associate professor of history at Duke University.  

Woods holds a doctorate in history from the University of South Carolina. He has authored three books, “Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States,” “Bleeding Kansas: Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border,” and his most recent, “Arguing until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy.”  

Huston holds a doctorate from Yale University, and is the author of “Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York,” “The Early American Republic: A History in Documents,” and is currently completing, “Reforging American Democracy: Political Practices in the United States, 1812-1840.”  

The event is sponsored by the Department of History and the Jackson-Hope Fund. It is free and open to the public.  

-VMI-