Participants will tour presidential sites, national parks, historic sites, and battlefields. "There's no better way to learn about our heritage than getting out and exploring the places where history was made, said Gleaves Whitney, director of the Hauenstein Center. Richard Norton Smith is a master historian who knows how to make the past come alive. We cant think of a better partner in the Hauenstein Centers on-going mission to explore the presidency."
Smith began offering his tours in 2000 when he was executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and the first director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies.
The next tour, "Presidents and Patriots," will depart from Washington, D.C., on April 28, 2006. After 10 days of traveling through Virginia and Pennsylvania and touring key sites to America's founding and the Civil War, participants will wind their way back to the nation's capital on May 7.
To learn more about the tour go to www.allpresidents.org. To schedule an interview call the Hauenstein Center at (616) 331-2770 or Grand Valleys News and Information Services Office at (616) 331-2221.
More on Smith:
Richard Norton Smith is a nationally recognized authority on the
American presidency and a familiar face to viewers of C-SPAN, as well
as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he appears regularly as part of
the show's round table of historians.
Perhaps best-known as a historian and biographer, Mr. Smith is currently at work on a life of Nelson A. Rockefeller to be published in 2006, and based on extensive original research and interviews with Rockefeller associates.
In March 1996, Mr. Smith became Director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library, where he supervised a $5 million renovation as well as a series of temporary exhibits and conferences which generated national interest and dramatically boosted museum visitation and fundraising. In September, 2000 he became the first executive director of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation and director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University, positions he left in December, 2001 to assume the directorship of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
In November, 2003, Smith became director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. He oversaw the opening of the world-class complex that contains nearly 40,000 square feet of museum exhibits and a 47,000-item library collection. He resigned in January 2006 to accept an academic opportunity at George Mason University.
