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Author to discuss ‘Mourning Lincoln’ Oct. 13

September 21, 2016

mourning-lincoln-portraitNoted historian and author Martha Hodes will discuss her latest book on how ordinary people mourned the death of Abraham Lincoln during the 13th annual Lincoln Lecture, scheduled for 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 13, in Altgeld Auditorium.

In “Mourning Lincoln: The Assassination and the Aftermath of the Civil War,” Hodes details the responses of ordinary individuals — Northern and Southern, white and black, soldiers and civilians, women and men – through their diaries and personal correspondence. Those responses paint a portrait of an extremely fractured nation, foreshadowing the future battles over Reconstruction and making the nation whole again.

“Mourning Lincoln” has earned acclaim from the Wall Street Journal as a Best Nonfiction Book (2015), in addition to receiving the 2016 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the 2016 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. The book has also been selected as a long list finalist for the 2015 National Book Awards for Nonfiction.

Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, teaches courses on race, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and 19th century United States. She also teaches additional courses in history-writing,

Martha Hodes

Martha Hodes

such as Writing the Civil War, History and Storytelling, Biography and History, Reconstructing Lives, and Experimental History.

She has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Salon.com, and has appeared on the PBS News Hour. Hodes is the author of three books – “Mourning Lincoln” (Yale University Press, 2015), “The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century” (W. W. Norton, 2006) and “White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South” (Yale University Press, 1997).

The W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series brings to campus distinguished scholars who address topics of historical interest to both the academic community and the general public. The lectures engage key issues and are often interdisciplinary, in the spirit of the research, writing and teaching of the late professor Bruce Lincoln, who was a best-selling historian of Russia and esteemed member of the NIU History Department.

To learn more about NIU’s Lincoln Lecture Series, go to niu.edu/history/programs/lincoln.