Molly Michelmore to Deliver Lecture in Honor of Her Appointment to the S. Blount Mason Jr. Professorship Michelmore’s talk, titled “The Taxpayers’ Century: Taxes, Politics and the Making of the Modern U.S.,” will be held Nov. 4 in Northen Auditorium.
Molly Michelmore, professor of history at Washington and Lee University, will deliver a public lecture celebrating her appointment to the S. Blount Mason Jr. Professorship.
Michelmore’s lecture, “The Taxpayers’ Century: Taxes, Politics and the Making of the Modern U.S.,” will be held at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4, in Northen Auditorium in Leyburn Library. The talk is free and open to the public and will be immediately followed by a reception held in Leyburn 128.
Michelmore will discuss how the language of taxpayers’ rights came to shape debates over non-tax issues like reproductive rights and immigration. Her lecture will show how “tax talk” has driven policy outcomes, transformed political debate and defined who gets to claim the rights, privileges and power of American citizenship.
“I hope that people learn that taxes matter — and they matter in policy arenas that we don’t typically think of as related to taxes,” said Michelmore. “We tend to think of taxes as an economic issue, but debates over who pays — and what they pay for — have shaped some of the most important political and social conflicts in the nation’s recent past.”
Michelmore has been a member of the W&L faculty since 2006 and served as the head of the History Department from 2017 until 2025. At W&L, she has served on the Faculty Executive Committee, the Shepherd Faculty Review Committee, the Committee on Courses and Degrees, the President’s Advisory Committee, as a representative to the Board of Trustees and as the co-chair of the Faculty Handbook Revision Committee. She has also served on the Executive Committee and as co-chair of the fiscal policy network for the Social Science History Association.
Michelmore’s research focuses on fiscal policy and welfare state formation, as well as American political development. She has authored several book chapters and peer-reviewed articles and has produced two books, “Tax and Spend: The Welfare State, Tax Politics and the Limits of American Liberalism” (2012) and “The United States in World War II: A Documentary History” (2018), co-edited with Mark Stoler. Michelmore holds a Bachelor of Arts in history from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan.
The S. Blount Mason Jr. Professorship was established in 1973 in memory of S. Blount Mason Jr., Class of 1905, a Baltimore insurance executive who died in 1969. The endowment for the chair came from trusts created by Mason and his wife to benefit, after their deaths, certain charities in which they were interested.
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