Past Fall Lectures

2021-2025

2025 November 16 – Final Freedom: the Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment with Brown University Professor & Author Dr. Michael Vorenberg. Michael Vorenberg specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with a particular focus on the topics of the Civil War, emancipation, law, and the U.S. Constitution. He received his PhD at Harvard University and was then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center. After teaching as an assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo, he started his career at Brown in 1999. He is the author, most recently, of Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025). His writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, Politico, and the Washington Post.

2024 November 24 – Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). A private showing at Theatre N in Wilmington of the 1940 film based on Robert Sherwood’s Pulitizer Prize-winning play. The film stars Raymond Massey in a career-defining role as our 16th president. Ruth Gordon, in her film debut, plays Mary Todd Lincoln. The event also included a small exhibition,“Raymond Massey in Delaware,” drawn from the Lincoln Collection at the University of Delaware.

2023 November 19 – The 2023 Fall Program marked the 160th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, which endures as one of President Lincoln’s most important speeches. Wilmington attorney Martin Lessner spoke about the importance of this iconic American address.  A PDF of “Lessner-Gettysburg-Address-2023-11-19” is available for reading or the presentation may be viewed on Youtube. (Note: This presentation may not be reproduced without permission of the author.) Historian W. Barksdale Maynard provided a Delaware connection to Gettysburg as he described the design of the 2000 Delaware state memorial monument at the historic battlefield.

2022 November 20 – Todd Harra, Delaware mortician and author of fiction and non-fiction books related to American funerary traditions, including Last Rites: the Evolution of the American Funeral. He spoke about the dual importance of scientific advances in caring for the Civil War dead and the precedence of Lincoln’s funeral procession in the history of American post-mortem practices and traditions of mourning. His presentation was recorded by C-Span2 American History TV and made available for viewing December 24, 2022.

2021 November 21 – The Hon. Henry duPont Ridgely, retired Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, past president of the Lincoln Club of Delaware, chair of the Delaware Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (2009) on “Delaware and Mr. Lincoln.” (Note: This presentation may not be reproduced without permission of the author.)