Lance Banning, Library of Congress

Lance Banning is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught since 1973. A native of Kansas City, he received his B.A. from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1964 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1968 and 1971. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for the History of Freedom. Banning is coeditor of the University Press of Kansas series "American Political Thought," editor of After the Constitution: Party Conflict in the New Republic (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1989), and author of many articles and essays on the American Founding and the first party struggle. His first book, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), received the international book award of Phi Alpha Theta and was nominated by the press for Pulitzer, Bancroft, and other prizes. Jefferson and Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding, a revision of his 1992 Merrill Jensen Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, and The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic were published in 1995. The latter received the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. During the spring of 1997, Banning held the John Adams Chair in American History, a senior Fulbright appointment, at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.