Abraham Lincoln and America 250

On George Washington’s birthday in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln spoke to an audience gathered at Independence Hall. Moved by the moment, Lincoln explained that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” In 2017, Mississippi State University (MSU) received the nation’s largest privately held collection of Lincolniana. This talk by historian Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D., the Frank & Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies at MSU, uses the Williams Collection of Lincolniana to discuss how America’s founding documents inspired Lincoln’s understanding of freedom, democracy, and citizenship during the American Civil War.

 

Speakers Expertise:

Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. is the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. She specializes in the study of military history, especially of nineteenth-century America and the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The author of numerous publications, Ural's writing almost always ties back to the experiences of soldiers in war and peace. Her work has ranged from an analysis of the motivations of Irish-Catholic volunteers in the Union Army (The Harp and the Eagle, 2006), to the development and evolution of the Confederacy's most celebrated unit (Hood's Texas Brigade, 2017), to the common experiences of Americans in the Civil War (Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades, 2013), to the experiences of marginalized groups at war (ed. Civil War Citizens, 2010). Ural speaks regularly to local, state, and national organizations and has several talks featured on CSPAN. She has been a guest editor for a special issue focused on veterans for The Journal of the Civil War Era, she serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Military History (which she chaired from 2014-2019), War & Society, Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and Civil War Times Illustrated, and is a past president of the Mississippi Historical Society. Ural co-directs, with Dr. Lindsey Peterson, the federally funded Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM.org), which digitizes, transcribes, and annotates over 20,000 documents written by Mississippians of all backgrounds during this revolutionary era and makes them freely available online.   Her latest research focuses on Abraham Lincoln and Civil War soldiers.