Dr. Kate Steir is Senior Curator and Head of Collections at Gunston Hall. She has a PhD from Georgetown University in History and has been at Gunston Hall since 2021. Before coming to Gunston Hall, she held curatorial and educational roles at a variety of museums including the Boston Children’s Museum, the National Museum of American History, and Tudor Place Historic House and Garden. Her dissertation entitled “Provisions of Power: Food and Scarcity in Jamaica 1730-1790” focused on the politics of food scarcity and its relationship to slavery in the context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Dr. Steir's work has been published in numerous places including the blog for the National Museum of American History as well as in the American Historical Association's Perspectives, and she has been featured on several podcasts including Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant and The Tattooed Historian Show.
NPC Headliners: Letter from George Mason
Registration to this event is essential in gaining access to the Club.
Jun 10 2025
WHEN:
Jun 10, 2025 at 10:00am
WHERE:
Holeman Lounge
CONTACT INFO:
Cecily Scott Martin
MORE INFO:
NPC Newsmaker
Registration/tickets required
On Tuesday, June 10 at 10 a.m., Gunston Hall’s Digital Fellow and Graduate Student Nick Gentry and Senior Curator and Head of Collections Kate Steir, Ph.D. will be at a National Press Club Headliners Coffee and Conversation to discuss an unpublished George Mason and George Washington letter discovered by Gentry. The letter, dated April 6, 1768, also features a reply in George Washington’s hand dated 1789.
The text of this letter sheds unexpected light on the private dealings—and quiet tensions—between two pillars of the Revolutionary era: George Washington and George Mason. It adds an additional dimension to the complex personal and political relationship between Mason and Washington—especially considering their later public split over the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The letter reflects Mason’s effort to settle a boundary disagreement, referencing surveys, patents, and competing claims from as far back as the 1670s.
Doors open at 9:30 a.m. with a light breakfast of coffee, tea, muffins and pastries. Tickets cost $5 for members of the National Press Club and $15 for the general public. Tickets must be paid for at the time of purchase.
Nicholas Gentry is an archivist and librarian with research interests in American philanthropic history and documentary editing. He is currently the digital archives fellow for George Mason's Gunston Hall and a graduate student at the University of Maryland College of Information.