Constitution Day September 17, 2026
Each year, the Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy celebrates the Constitution by offering educational programming to USCA and the Aiken community.
The event is free and open to the public, registration is not required.
Thursday, September 17, 2026, at 11 a.m., in Penland 106.
Speaker
Dr. Woody Holton, Professor of History, McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina.
Professor Holton teaches Early American history, especially the American Revolution, with a focus on economic history and on African Americans, Native Americans, and women.
Professor Holton teaches graduate seminars on Colonial America and on the American Revolution. At the undergraduate level, he teaches the first half of the U.S. history survey and upper-level classes on Early American Women, the American Revolution, and Early African Americans. In the near future, he will teach seminars on slave rebellions and on the history of capitalism in North America.
Holton’s 2009 book, Abigail Adams, which he wrote on a Guggenheim fellowship, won the Bancroft Prize. Holton is the author of Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007), a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the National Book Award. His first book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999), won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti award.
Dr. Holton holds a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University.