Please join us on Friday, May 16 for our annual Nye-Sommers Lecture, presented by Professor Harold Holzer, one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and winner of the coveted Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.
Professor Holzer’s lecture will chart Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes in his latest book, Brought Forth on This Continent, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln’s life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.
Those who are unable to attend this engagement in person are invited to tune in to the lecture and Q&A session via Zoom. Click on the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85971439728. No password in required. To dial in by phone, call 1-301-715-8592 or click on the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kckM0vf7UD. The meeting ID # is 859 7143 9728.Zoom participants should join the meeting by 7:00 pm.
