On July 15, 2021 historian Carolyn Eastman exanimated the career of James Ogilvie, a now-forgotten celebrity of the very early nineteenth century, and what it tells us about the intersection of political culture and celebrity—at a moment when the United States was in the midst of invention.

Carolyn Eastman is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She specializes in early America with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century political culture, the media, and gender. She is the author of the prizewinning A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution and, most recently, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity.

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