1835 Lecture

John Stauffer, Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, will speak about the fascinating relationship that existed between two of the seminal figures of the 19th century: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Among the leading scholars of antislavery and the Civil War era, Stauffer is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles.
Lecture Sponsors: Carole and Ed Rigaud
JOHN Stauffer is Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Among the leading scholars of antislavery and the Civil War era, he is the author or editor of eight books and more than 50 articles. They include Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), which won the Iowa Author Award and a Boston Authors award and was a Boston Globe and Amazon.com bestseller; The State of Jones (2009, with Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins), on Southern Unionism in Civil War Mississippi, which was a New York Times bestseller and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and The Black Hearts of Men (2002), a collective biography of the friendship between two black and two white abolitionists, which won three awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the 2nd Place Lincoln Prize. Other books include The Writings of James McCune Smith (2006), featuring essays from the foremost black intellectual in the nineteenth century; The Problem of Evil (with Steven Mintz, 2006), on the dilemmas of slavery and antislavery; and Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (with Zoe Trodd). John's essays have appeared in Time Magazine, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Raritan, New York Sun, and 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography. He has appeared on national radio and television shows, including the Diane Rehm Show and Book TV with Susan Swain, and he has lectured widely throughout the United States and Europe. He has also worked as a consultant for the filmmaker Gary Ross (writer, director, producer of Seabiscuit, Dave, Big, Pleasantville), who wrote a screenplay based on the research that went into The State of Jones. The movie will hopefully appear as a major motion picture in the next few years. John received his M.A. from Purdue University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, where he worked with David Brion Davis, Jon Butler, and Alan Trachtenberg. He started teaching at Harvard in 1999 and received tenure in 2004.