Join us for a captivating study day exploring the travel journals of Edward Geoffrey Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, later three-time Prime Minister and Britain’s longest-serving party leader. The first, A Grand Tour Journal 1820–1822, follows his adventurous journey by horse and carriage from Knowsley to Naples. The second, A North American Journal 1824–1825, chronicles eighteen months of travel across the United States and Canada, from New York and Boston to the Mississippi, New Orleans, and Washington DC.

Stanley met prominent figures including Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and the Marquis de Lafayette, observed Congress and state legislatures, and introduced James Fenimore Cooper to Lake George. With keen sociological insight, he examined politics, society, education, agriculture, slavery, and more. A few years before Alexis de Tocqueville, Stanley offered a rare, aristocratic yet remarkably open-minded perspective on the young American republic, producing a journal that rivals the finest British travel accounts of the period.