Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Dr. Eric Foner will examine “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery” in a lecture at Eastern Kentucky University on Tuesday, March 5.
Foner, who also received the Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize for his work, will speak at 7:30 p.m. in O’Donnell Hall of the Student Success Building. The event, part of EKU’s year-long Chautauqua series and the University’s year-long observance of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, is free and open to the public.
Foner, who will base his lecture on his 2010 book of the same title that earned the three awards, is one of only two persons to have served as president of three major professional history organizations – the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians – and one of only a handful to have received the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes in the same year.
The talk, Foner said, “will trace the evolution of Lincoln’s ideas and policies relating to slavery and race in the United States, from his pre-Civil War political career through emancipation and discussions of the status of blacks in the post-war world. It will also examine his complex relationship with abolitionists and Radical Republicans, as well as the factors that impelled him forward toward issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.”
The Boston Globe called Foner’s book “a masterwork (by) the preeminent historian of the Civil War era,” and the New York Times Book Review selected “Fiery Trial” as a Notable Book of the Year.
Fellow historian and author David Brion Davis said, “While many thousands of books deal with Lincoln and slavery, Eric Foner has written the definitive account of this crucial subject, illuminating in a highly original and profound way the interactions of race, slavery, public opinion, politics and Lincoln’s own character that led the wholly improbable uncompensated emancipation of some four million slaves.”
Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, has authored many other books, including “Reconstruction: American’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,” which also won a Bancroft Prize. In addition, he has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and lectured extensively.
The EKU lecture is also sponsored by The Office of the Associate Provost for Diversity Planning, Department of Government, Department of History, and the EKU Cultural Center.
To see the complete schedule of the 2012-13 EKU Chautauqua Lectures, visit www.chautauqua.eku.edu. For more information, contact Chautauqua Lecture Coordinator Dr. Minh Nguyen at minh.nguyen@eku.edu.
To learn more about EKU’s Civil War sesquicentennial observance, visit www.eku.edu/news/sesquicentennial or contact Dr. Tom Appleton at tom.appleton@eku.edu.
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