Prize-Winning Authors Saunders, Blight, and Ayers Highlight November’s Lincoln Forum XXIII
Originally published June 2018 · p. 13
Two popular and distinguished Lincoln Prize laureates, 2002 honoree David W. Blight and this year’s winner, Edward L. Ayers—plus the much-discussed Man Booker Prize-winning novelist George Saunders—head the list of faculty to appear at the 23rd annual Lincoln Forum Symposium November 16-18 at Gettysburg, Penn. The threeday event will take place at the Wyndham Hotel.
Edward Ayers David W. Blight Saunders is the author of the critically acclaimed #1 New York Times best seller Lincoln in the Bardo, the first Lincoln novel to win the prestigious $100,000 Man Booker literary prize in the nearly 50-year history of the competition. Saunders’ first novel offers a breathtakingly original interpretation of Lincoln’s profound grief over the death of his 11-year-old son Willie in 1862. Saunders’ appearance at Gettysburg this November will mark the writer’s debut at an Abraham Lincoln symposium.
George Saunders Ayers, president emeritus of the University of Richmond (where he currently serves as Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities), was previously co-winner of the first and only “e-Lincoln Prize” in 2002 for the CD-ROM Valley of the Shadow: The Eve of War. In addition, he won both the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes for his 2004 study, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America. In 2012, President Obama awarded Ayers the National Humanities Medal. Ayers’ latest Lincoln Prize came this year for his new book, The Thin Light of Freedom: Emancipation in the Heart of America.
Yale historian Blight earned the Lincoln Prize (along with the Frederick Douglass Prize, Bancroft Prize, and several other major awards) 17 years ago for Race and Reunion, a landmark study of how the North and South re-divided over the meanings of the recently fought American Civil War. Professor Blight, longtime director of Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Institute for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, is the author of an eagerly anticipated new biography of Frederick Douglass. He will discuss the Douglass book as this year’s Forum keynoter—marking the 200th anniversary of the 19th-century leader’s birth.
Authors to Make First Appearances, Popular Favorites to Return Among other scholars who will appear at Forum XXIII for the first time are University of Michigan historian Kate Masur, editor of a new edition of William D. Washington’s rare and neglected book of Lincoln recollections by the 16th president’s African-American contemporaries; and Nicholas J.C. Pistor, author of Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century. In addition, four veteran speakers will return to the Forum podium: co-chairman Frank J. Williams (chief justice emeritus of Rhode Island) will discuss post-Civil War justice (and injustice) North and South; co-chairman Harold Holzer (director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at New York’s Hunter College) will debut his forthcoming biography of Lincoln Memorial sculptor Daniel Chester French; and Professor John F. Marszalek, editor of the recently published, annotated edition of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, will discuss his new book in conversation with his frequent on-stage colleague, Dr. Craig L. Symonds, the award-winning Civil War and World War II naval scholar who currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Marszalek is executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library in Starkville, Miss. Historian Catherine Clinton, the Debman Chair in American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of the reigning biography of Mary Lincoln, will lead a panel on “Women and the Civil War.”
The session will feature Edna Greene Medford, professor of history at Howard University (who has written about enslaved women and women of color after emancipation); Candace Shy Hooper, author of the recent book Lincoln’s General’s Wives; and Kate Masur, whose special areas of expertise and research include gender and sexual history before 1900. A second panel will be scheduled soon. Commented co-chairmen Williams and Holzer: “We are delighted to welcome back some of the Forum’s all-time favorite speakers this November, along with a number of extraordinary writers and scholars who will be making their debuts at the symposium. Year in and year out, we remain astonished and heartened that so much new and neglected scholarship, and so much brilliant writing, continues to be applied to the Lincoln theme. We look forward to greeting our gifted speakers—and our loyal audiences—as we head back to Gettysburg this November.”
Additional Events As in past years, the Forum will also present recitations of
Lincoln speeches by George Buss, member of the executive committee of the Forum Board and the nation’s leading Abraham Lincoln enactor. The event will also feature: a bookstore and all-author book-signing event; small breakout sessions with Forum speakers and members; a Gettysburg Battlefield tour; and another session of the popular “Cooking with the Chief and the Chef” featuring period recipes as interpreted by Chairman Williams (a noted cook) and the chef of the Wyndham Hotel, Andrew Ernst. First-time Forum attendees will be welcomed at a special reception in their honor on the symposium’s opening day. Forum registration is open to paid-up members only, who will be notified by email when enrollment begins. Registration at the Wyndham must be made separately. For more information on membership and symposium schedules, see the official Forum website at www.thelincolnforum. org. Questions may be addressed via email to: [email protected].