Catherine Allgor is the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her first book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic after having garnered the OAH Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize in its original form. She is also the author of Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (2012) and A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (2006), and the editor of The Queen of America: Mary Cutts' Life of Dolley Madison (2012). She was appointed by President Obama to the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. Allgor previously served as the Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library, and taught at the University of California Riverside, Claremont McKenna College, Harvard University, and Simmons College. She began her career as an actor and interpreter at Plimoth Plantation.