Presidential Scholar Richard Norton Smith To Speak, May 1

Date: 4/10/07
Contact: Eric Jome

“Our Lincoln” will be the subject of the 2007 Bryant Jackson Lectureship presented by presidential historian and scholar Richard Norton Smith, on Tuesday, May 1, at 2 p.m. in the Bone Student Center Circus Room. The event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow the presentation.

Smith’s lecture will examine how each new generation rediscovers Abraham Lincoln and how Lincoln’s life is constantly reinterpreted using a modern cultural lens. Smith will help to strip away those modern interpretations and focus on Lincoln’s life and work in the context of the early and mid 19th century.

Smith is currently a scholar in residence at George Mason University. During his career he has been the director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, acting director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Center, director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, director of the Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum, and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Smith appears regularly on C-SPAN, as well as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, where he is a part of the show's round table of historians. He is currently at work on a biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller based on extensive original research and interviews with Rockefeller associates. Smith's first major book, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, was a finalist for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. He has also written An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (1984), The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (1986), Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (1993) and The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick (1997).

Smith’s presentation is sponsored by the Bryant Jackson Lectureship and the Sage Trust. The Lectureship, sponsored by Illinois State University’s Milner Library, was established in 2003 to honor Associate University Librarian Bryant Jackson. The lectureship is an annual event with speakers of the highest reputation in library research.

For more information contact Toni Tucker in Milner Library at (309) 438-7402.