JANUARY 28, 2010 ISSUE
Not To Omit Mr. Lincoln…
Lincoln Historian Harold Holzer To Lecture February 8
Historian Harold Holzer will speak on Abraham Lincoln as part of ASU’s Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday, February 8, at Farthing Auditorium.The Distinguished Lecture Series at ASU presents Lincoln historian Harold Holzer at Farthing Auditorium on Monday, February 8, at 8:00 p.m. Holzer will give a talk titled “Why Lincoln Matters—To History, To Our Presidents, and Us.”
ASU’s University Forum Committee, comprised of faculty and staff at the university, revived the Distinguished Lecture Series in February 2008 with a lecture by feminist activist Gloria Steinem. Last year, the committee organized the Darwin Bicentennial Series, which featured more than a dozen speakers and other events commemorating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer and frequent guest on television, he serves as co-chairman of the United States Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is senior vice president for external affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
“We chose Harold Holzer to speak on Lincoln because we realized that in scheduling the Darwin Series last year, we totally ignored Lincoln’s 200th birthday,” said Dr. Howie Neufeld, an ASU biology professor and chair of the University Forum Committee. In fact, he noted, Darwin and Lincoln were born on the exact same day of the same year.
“More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other person except perhaps for Jesus, with Darwin right up there also,” Neufeld said. “So even 200 years after his birth, Lincoln still commands our attention, and his actions have had impacts that reverberate even today. It should be a great talk.”
Holzer has authored, coauthored and edited 30 books on Lincoln and the Civil War, including The Lincoln Image, Lincoln Seen and Heard, Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President, Lincoln as I Knew Him and Lincoln on Democracy. His 2004 book Lincolnat Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President won the prestigious Lincoln Prize.
His most recent book, Lincoln President-Elect, published in October 2008, examines the four months between Lincoln’s election and inauguration, when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency. He rejected compromises urged on him by Republicans, Democrats, Northerners and Southerners that might have preserved the Union a little longer but would have enshrined slavery for generations.
The other speaker in this semester’s Distinguished Lecture Series will be Anne Garrels, who will speak at Farthing Auditorium on Tuesday, March 23. Garrels is a senior foreign correspondent for National Public Radio.
The Distinguished Lecture Series saw a decrease in funding this year due to budget constraints at ASU.
“We were very fortunate that ASU had enough funds during the Darwin year to allow all those speakers to come to campus. Had he been born one year later, we might have only had two speakers,” Neufeld quipped.
Neufeld said the committee is working with the development officer for ASU’s University College to seek additional support for the lecture series, including underwriting and endowments.
He said the committee is currently finalizing its speaker choices for next year, working on a tentative theme of “Environmental Preservation and the Fate of Humanity.” The series would tie in with the recent celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and this year’s 75th anniversary celebration of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The committee hopes to bring in two speakers in fall 2010 and two in spring 2011.
“There should be something for everyone over the course of the academic year,” he said.
For more information about the Distinguished Lecture Series, click to www.universityforum.appstate.edu or call 828-262-2683.
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