Acclaimed Lincoln Historian Will Inaugurate John L. Hatfield ’67 Lecture Series

Abraham Lincoln’s presidential leadership and his moral relationship with power will be the subject of this year’s annual Friends of Skillman Library Lecture delivered by Richard Carwardine, Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104.

Carwardine’s talk will inaugurate a new named lectureship honoring Lafayette alumnus John L. Hatfield ’67. Hatfield, a history major who studied with Albert W. Gendebien ’34, professor emeritus of history, has generously endowed the Friends of Skillman Library’s annual lecture. The upcoming lecture will be the first-ever Hatfield Lecture.

Carwardine is the author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, first published in England by Pearson/Longman in 2003 and followed by an American edition issued by Alfred A. Knopf in 2006. The volume received the prestigious Lincoln Prize from the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, which carries the largest purse of any prize in American history.

“This is the biography of Lincoln the world has been waiting for,” says Lewis Lehrman, who along with Richard Gilder, both of Gettysburg College, endowed the prize. “Richard Carwardine has drawn a powerful portrait that highlights Lincoln’s moral convictions and his political acumen, his respect for ideas and his mastery of public opinion.”

Carwardine, who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford, taught at the University of Sheffield until 2002, when he began teaching at Oxford. He published two major studies prior to the work on Lincoln, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1795-1865 (Greenwood Press, 1978) and Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Yale University Press, 1993). His current research looks at the role of religion in the evolution of America between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.