The CWRTDC and LGDC were delighted to jointly host a meeting with:
HAROLD HOLZER
who discussed the topic
"Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration"
on Wednesday, February 21, 2024
About the Topic:
Mr. Holzer spoke on the topic of “Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration,” based on his just released book, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.
In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.
Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.
Mr. Holzer charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes,
The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’
An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.
About the Speaker:
Mr. Holzer is the winner of The 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize and is one of the country's leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. A prolific writer and lecturer, as ell as a frequent guest on television, Mr. Holzer served for six years (2010–2016) as Chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. During the previous 10 years, he co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC), appointed by President Clinton. President Bush awarded Mr. Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Mr. Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama.
Harold Holzer is The Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. He is also currently the chairman of The Lincoln Forum.
For more information about Mr. Holzer and for a list of his numerous books and articles, visit his website at www.haroldholzer.com
