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This program focuses on the long history of New Jersey’s executive office, assessing individual governors and discussing the qualities that made them noteworthy.
* Use this link to join our virtual program: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84581904461
New Jersey’s chief executive enjoys more authority than any, but a handful of governors in the United States. Historically speaking, however, governors exercised less influence than met the eye. In the colonial period few proprietary or royal governors were able to make policy in the face of combative assemblies. The Revolutionary generation’s hostility to executive power contributed to a weak governor system that carried over into the 19th and 20th centuries, until the Constitution was thoroughly revised in 1947. Before that date a handful of governors made a meaningful impact on state affairs Since 1947, New Jersey’s governors, exercising considerable authority, have ranged from the outstanding to the terrible. The author of this book will talk about them.
Presented by: Michael J. Birkner is Professor of History at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1989, chairing the department from 1993-2003 and serving as Benjamin Franklin Professor of Liberal Arts from 2001-2016. Birkner is the author or editor of fourteen books and many articles on 19th and 20th century American social and political history. He has written and lectured extensively on the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and James Buchanan, as well as aspects of New Jersey history. In addition to coediting "The Governors of New Jersey", published in 2013 by Rutgers University Press, he has published biographies of Samuel L. Southard (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 1984) and Richard P. McCormick (Greenwood Press, 2001), as well as a CHOICE Magazine “outstanding academic book” for 1994, "A Country Place No More: The Transformation of Bergenfield, New Jersey, 1894-1994." He served for five years as book review editor of New Jersey History and contributed to Maxine N. Lure and Richard Veit, eds., "New Jersey: A History of the Garden State" (Rutgers University Press, 2012).
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