Author and historian Catherine Clinton returns to the Union Theater of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2, 2013 for a discussion on the deaths of Willie, the son of Abraham Lincoln, and Joseph, the son of Jefferson Davis, in their respective White Houses. The authoress of books on Mary Lincoln and Harriet Tubman, she is also Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast.
Catherine Clinton is an American-born professor of American history at Queen’s University Belfast. She has degrees from Harvard University and Princeton University. A former member of the executive council of the Society of American Historians, she sits on the Advisory Committee to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the Advisory Board for the Virginia Sesquicentennial Commission.
In 2004, Back Bay Books published her biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. The Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Tribune named it one of the best non-fiction books of 2004.
In 2009, Harper Collins published her biography, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life. In 2011, Penguin published a book she edited, Mary Chestnut’s Diary.
Both Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), President of the United States of America, and Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), President of the Confederate States of America, “suffered the loss of a child while in office, not an unusual circumstance for the majority of American parents in the 19th Century, but a very poignant reminder of life's fragility, especially during the Civil War, which robbed over 700,000 families of sons within an intense, four year period,” stated the ALPM. “The circumstances leading up to and surrounding the death of Willie Lincoln in 1862 and the tragic accident which robbed the Davis family of their young son Joseph in 1864 are explored in brief, with an extended treatment of the sentimentalization of Victorian mourning, the rise of the ‘Black branch’ of the fashion industry, and the widespread embrace of rituals of grief and symbols of remembrance in every day American life during the Civil War.”
Mourning in America: Death in the Civil War White Houses is a free discussion and open to the public, but reservations for this event are required. Reservations may be made by visiting this link: http://bit.ly/MourningTix
The title of this presentation is a pun. It references “Morning in America,” the common name for one of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign television commercials.
Here’s a video of talk show host Conan O’Brien visiting the ALPM and the Old Capitol in Springfield: http://teamcoco.com/video/lincoln-remote.
Comments