UCR Historian and Presidential Appointee Sworn In

Catherine Allgor begins six-year term on James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation board, meets with California history teachers

By Bettye Miller on September 5, 2012

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — UC Riverside history professor Catherine Allgor has been sworn in as a member of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation Board of Trustees and will serve a six-year term. Allgor was nominated by President Barack Obama in September 2011 and later confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She was sworn in at the foundation’s annual meeting June 27.

While in Washington, D.C., Allgor met with three American history teachers from Southern California who received fellowships from the foundation. They are Christoph Brown, from Poly High School in Riverside, and Dennis Bullock, from Providence High School in Burbank, who were named fellows in 2011; and Juan Resendez, from Irvine High School in Irvine, a 2012 fellow. The three were in Washington to attend the foundation’s four-week Summer Institute on the Constitution that began June 18. Among the guest speakers was U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, established by Congress in 1986, promotes the teaching of the U.S. Constitution by giving fellowships of up to $24,000 to secondary school educators, enabling them to get master’s degrees in American history, American government, and social studies. The foundation is an independent agency of the executive branch of the federal government.

“The idea is to teach teachers so they can create an informed citizenry,” says Allgor, who is nationally known as an expert on the role of women in American political history, particularly the influence of the country’s first ladies.

Foundation fellowships honor the legacy of James Madison, the nation’s fourth president and the primary author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Fellows are selected in an annual competition with applicants from each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the nation’s island and trust territories. The fellowships are funded by income from a trust fund in the U.S. Treasury and from private gifts, corporate contributions, and foundation grants. Recipients are required to teach American history or social studies in a secondary school for at least one year for each year of fellowship support.

Application information is available at www.jamesmadison.com.

Allgor, who joined the UC Riverside faculty in 2001, wrote “Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government” and “A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation,” and edited “The Queen of America,” Mary Cutts’s memoir of her famous aunt Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press, 2012).

Archived under: Inside UCR, american political history, Catherine Allgor, first ladies, history, james madison memorial fellowship foundation, press release, teaching, U.S. history

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