With a lifelong passion for both theater and history, Adele Gutman Nathan made a career of creating historical pageants, leading to her crowning achievement, writing a guide for Americans to celebrate their country’s bicentennial. Nathan graduated from Goucher College in 1910 and earned an MA from Johns Hopkins University. In Baltimore she helped found the Vagabond Players in 1916. In New York, she directed the Cellar Players of the Hudson Guild from the 1920s to the 1940s and headed the Federal Theater Project in New Jersey in 1937. She wrote for periodicals that included Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times Magazine, and wrote fourteen children’s books, many of which were translated into other languages. But she was known for her talent at staging historical pageants and commemorative events, from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs to the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. She also served as archivist for the American Revolution Roundtable from 1941–1950 and president of The Woman Pays (a feminist club for artists and intellectuals) from 1967–1968 and 1977–1983. In 1974 she published How to Plan and Conduct a Bicentennial Celebration for the upcoming American bicentennial.