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Season Six, Episode 4, Civics in the Classroom: Pearl Ponce
May 29, 2026

This is Civics in the Classroom, a podcast series from the Center for Presidential History at Â鶹Éç in Dallas, Texas. Civics in the Classroom is part of the A250 Summer Teacher Seminar, America's First Principles. This program to promote innovative K-12 instruction in U.S. history and civics was designed by the Center for Presidential History with support from the U.S. Department of Education and in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In the first year of this three-year project, our workshops and lectures will focus on the causes and context of the movement for U.S. independence and the production and legacy of its most famous document, the Declaration of Independence.  

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Pearl Ponce, who is the director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Before she stepped into that role, Pearl was a professor at Ithaca College, where she served as chair of the history department for six years. She’s a political and diplomatic historian with a specialty in the Civil War era — and the author of To Govern the Devil in Hell: The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas as well as the editor of Kansas's War: The Civil War in Documents. 

The music for this series comes from the album  by Blue Dot Sessions under an .