Join Us for Our July Monthly Luncheon
Friday, July 10th, 2026
11:30 AM at the Naples Hilton
Johanna Neuman
Author, Historian and Award-Winning Journalist
Johanna Neuman is an author, a historian and an award-winning journalist. After a career as a newspaper reporter, covering the White House, State Department and Congress for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau, she returned to the academe. Now a PhD in history, she is combining in her books the love of narrative storytelling she learned as a journalist and the skills of archival research she acquired as a historian.
In Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right To Vote, Johanna uncovered the identity and explored the motives of more than 200 of the nation’s most fashionable celebrities, chronicling their impact on the campaign to win women that most fundamental marker of citizenship – the right to vote. Publishers Weekly called it one of the top books for fall. One Amazon reviewer wrote, “Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists is a brilliant—and beautifully written—study of the campaign for women’s right to vote. Neuman deftly illuminates ‘the upstairs long missing from women’s history,’ recovering for the ages the contribution of elite society women to the movement.”
In her new book, Trump’s Superpower: A Historical Novel About the Founding Fathers & One Founding Mother, she brings the founders down from heaven for our 250th birthday. They have amusing encounters with 21st Century Americans – Benjamin Franklin is arresting for misgendering a bearish man named Christina, and George Washington, thanks to modern technology, finally has his teeth fixed. On a more serious note, throughout the book they have an ongoing conversation about whether America 2026 is really the country they meant to leave us. The book is titled Trump’s Superpower because as a student of both history and current political life, Johanna is convinced that President Trump understands that he can only make the country great again if he rescues the founders – and the founding – from a century-long assault by liberal academics and activists.