When: Tuesday, March 3rd, reception 5:00 to 5:30, speeches 5:30 to 7:00 pm
Where: Eaton Humanities 135
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During the decade of the 1850s, as the crisis over slavery worsened, many Americans no longer saw any essential connection between our two founding charters. In their own distinct ways, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass insisted upon the unity of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. They regarded attempts to separate them as destructive of the Union and an obstacle to Emancipation. But within this fundamental agreement, Lincoln and Douglass stressed different textual elements and proposed different pathways to reform. The lecture will explore their versions of revolutionary constitutionalism.

Speaker:
Diana Schaub is professor emerita of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a non-resident Senior Scholar in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. She was the Garwood Teaching Fellow at Princeton University in 2011-12 and Visiting Professor of Political Theory in the Government Department at Harvard University in 2018, 2020, and 2022. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. She was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters in 2001 and is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” along with numerous book chapters and scholarly articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a coeditor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. A member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, she also sits on the publication committee of National Affairs. Her book on Lincoln’s rhetoric and statesmanship, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation, appeared in 2021 from St. Martin’s Press.