Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington, Cassandra Good will be featured on the radio program With Good Reason July 23-29.
Titled “Founding Friendships,” the program addresses whether men and women can be just friends. Good argues that American men and women have maintained close friendships since our country’s founding, having discovered such genuine relationships for her 2015 book, Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic.
Good’s expertise focuses on politics, gender and cultural history in the early American republic. She also teaches a course called “The World of James Monroe,” which employs objects from the James Monroe Museum in Fredericksburg, Va.
Good spent nearly a decade researching friendships between men and women from 1780 to 1830. She scrutinized diaries, portraits and letters between men and women who lived during the founding era of United States history. She found friendships of little-known Americans as well as prominent figures of the era. Among them are Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who penned letters to one another, and George Washington, who corresponded with a woman named Elizabeth Powel.
Good received her doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in American Studies from George Washington University.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://www.withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/.
