The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press have just published the papers originally written for our 2006 Symposium which celebrated Woodrow Wilson’s 150th birthday that Woodrow Wilson House jointly sponsored with the official national memorial to Wilson—the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. That daylong symposium examined some of the most important and controversial areas of Wilson’s political life and presidency.

The collected essays are edited by Wilson150 Symposium keynote speaker, John Milton Cooper Jr, the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Cooper recently completed a stay at the Woodrow Wilson Center as a public policy scholar.

Some of today’s premier experts on Woodrow Wilson contributed to this collection of essays about the former statesman, portraying him as a complex, even paradoxical president. Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson reveals a person who was at once an international idealist, a structural reformer of the nation’s economy, and a policy maker who was simultaneously accommodating, indifferent, resistant, and hostile to racial and gender reform. Wilson’s progressivism is discussed in chapters by biographer John Milton Cooper and historians Trygve Throntveit and W. Elliot Brownlee. Wilson’s philosophy about race and nation is taken up by Gary Gerstle, and his gender politics discussed by Victoria Bissel Brown. The seeds of Wilsonianism are considered in chapters by Mark T. Gilderhus on Wilson’s Latin American diplomacy and war; Geoffrey R. Stone on Wilson’s suppression of seditious speech; and Lloyd Ambrosius on entry into World War I. Emily S. Rosenberg and Frank Ninkovich explore the impact of Wilson’s internationalism on capitalism and diplomacy; Martin Walker sets out the echoes of Wilson’s themes in the cold war; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University suggests how Wilson might view the promotion of liberal democracy today.

Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson will be avialable in our museum shop shortly, and is available for pre-order by clicking here.