Event Info: |
Lincoln and the West
The Legacy of the Lincoln Administration in the American West
Stanford University 2-Day Conference In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the Bill Lane Center for the West at Stanford is hosting a two-day public discussion of Lincoln's legacy in the American West. Join a select group of the nation's most respected scholars of the Civil War and the American West for lectures and panel conversations about the legacy of the Lincoln administration and the effects of the Civil War and its aftermath on race, nationalism, economic development, and culture in the West.
Free; Registration required (http://wedst.stanford.edu)
Open to the public.
Keynote Address
Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:30 PM
"Lincoln, Slavery, and the West"
James M. McPherson, Author and Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Kresge Auditorium
Stanford University
James M. McPherson taught at Princeton University for forty-two years until his retirement in 2004. He is the author of numerous books on the era of the American Civil War, including Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1989, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, which won the Lincoln Prize in 1998. He has served as president of the Society of American Historians and the American Historical Association. Full Day Conference
Friday, February 6, 2009 9:30 am 3:30 pm
Schwab Residential Center
Stanford University Bill Lane is the retired co-chairman of the board of Lane Publishing Co. and longtime publisher of Sunset Magazine. His professional career also includes numerous government assignments, such as past presidential
appointments as U.S. Ambassador to Australia and Ambassador-at-large in Japan. He has long been involved in supporting the history of the Stanford family and the University. 10:00 am Patty Limerick
"Meanwhile Back in the West: What Lincoln wanted from the West, and What He Got"
Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. Limerick has received a number of awards and honors recognizing the impact of her scholarship and her commitment to teaching, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Hazel Barnes Prize, CU's highest award for teaching and research. She regularly engages the public on the op-ed pages of local and national newspapers, and in the summer of 2005 she served as a guest columnist for the New York Times. 11:30 am
William Deverell, Glenna Matthews, and Michael Vouri
Panel Discussion
Lincoln's War and Lincoln's West: Ante, Bellum, and Post
Bill Deverell is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Professor of History at USC. He is author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and
co-editor with Greg Hise of Land of Sunshine: The Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. With David Igler, he is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to California and with Greg Hise, he is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book examining the post-Civil War American West.
Glenna Matthews is an historian trained at Stanford. Having achieved tenure at Oklahoma State, she resigned to return to her native California,where she has taught at both Berkeley and Stanford as a visiting associate professor. The author of several books - the last of which was Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream, published by Stanford University Press - she has also published numerous articles, many on California history topics. She is currently working on a book entitled California for the Union. Her work has received several awards, and she has been the recipient of both ACLS and NEH fellowships.
Michael Vouri is the Chief of Interpretation and Historian for San Juan Island National Historical Park, located on San Juan Island in the state of Washington. He is the author of The Pig War: Standoff at Griffin Bay (1999), Outpost of Empire: the Royal Marines and the Joint Occupation of San Juan Island (2004) and The Pig War, an illustrated history from Arcadia Publishing (2008). He is best known throughout Washington State and British Columbia for playing George Pickett in the Life and Times of General George Pickett, a one-man show which in 2009 enters its 14th season. He is also Vietnam veteran who, knowing the long-term costs of war, believes in peaceful arbitration. 1:00 pm
Hosted Lunch
2:15 pm
Elliott West
Afternoon Address
Lincoln's War, the West and the Remaking of America
Elliott West, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, teaches and writes on the history of the American West and frontier and on American environmental history. He has written five books and co-authored a sixth. The Contested Plains (University Press of Kansas, 1998) was a main selection of the History Book Club and received several national awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize as the years outstanding book in American history. He has written as well on western saloons, Native Americans on the Great Plains, and childrens lives on the frontier. He has twice received the University of Arkansas award as teacher of the year and in 1995 was named his states professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is past president of the Western History Association.
3:30 pm
Reception
Sponsors: Lincoln and the West is sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the West at Stanford University, in partnership with Stanford Continuing Studies. Lincoln and the West is made possible by a generous gift from
Ambassador L.W. Bill Lane Jr. |
