Lecture Series: Guest Speakers

Kate Clifford Larson, PhD., is an historian, consultant, and author, specializing in 19th and 20th century U.S. Women's and African American History. Dr. Larson has been a guest instructor at numerous professional development workshops for teachers, including National Endowment for the Humanities and Teaching American History programs, and has been a consultant and interpretive specialist for numerous museum, community, and public history initiatives related to American Slavery, the Underground Railroad, Abolition, and Harriet Tubman. She is the author of The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln (Basic Books, 2008), Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine/One World, 2004), and her latest book, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, a biography of the disabled sister of President John F. Kennedy, is due out in the fall of 2015 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 13 books and over 90 articles, including two books that were briefly national bestsellers: GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008); and State of Jones (2009), co-authored with Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins). The Black Hearts of Men (2002) was the co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Lincoln Prize 2nd Place winner. The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On, co-authored with Benjamin Soskis (2013), was a Lincoln Prize finalist. His most recent book is Sally Mann, Southern Landscape (2014).

His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Huffington Post. He has lectured throughout the U.S. and Europe, and he was an advisor for Django (2012), The Abolitionists (2013), The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), and the exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY (2012-14).

Frank J. Williams is the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island and is one of the country's most renowned experts on Abraham Lincoln. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, he has contributed chapters to several others, and has lectured on the subject throughout the country. At the same time, he and his wife, Virginia, have amassed an unsurpassed private library and archive that ranks among the nation's largest and finest Lincoln collections. In 2000, the Chief Justice was appointed to the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission created by Congress to plan events to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln in 2009. Since 1996, Chief Justice Williams has served as founding Chairman of The Lincoln Forum, a national assembly of Lincoln and Civil War devotees. For 9 years, he served as President of the Abraham Lincoln Association and, for 14 years, as President of The Lincoln Group of Boston. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography of all the Lincoln titles published since 1865 for Fordham University Press. His book of essays, Judging Lincoln, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2002. He, with Harold Holzer and Edna Greene Medford, has written The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views, Social, Legal and Pictorial published by Louisiana State University Press. His Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America's Greatest Leader, with William D. Pederson, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2009. His latest book Lincoln as Hero was selected as an alternate by the History Book Club. He also serves as Literary Editor of the Lincoln Herald where his quarterly "Lincolniana" survey appears.