Gilder Lehrman Center Hosts Lecture on Yesterday's Abolitionists/Today's Fundamentalists

Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition will host a talk on December 8 examining the claim by right-wing evangelicals of today that their political activism mirrors that of the abolitionist movement of the 19th century.

Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition will host a talk on December 8 examining the claim by right-wing evangelicals of today that their political activism mirrors that of the abolitionist movement of the 19th century.

The talk by James Brewer Stewart, titled “Repoliticizing the Abolitionists in Our Age of Fundamentalist Politics,” is the first event of the second annual David Brion Davis Lecture Series on the History of Slavery, Race and Their Legacies. It takes place at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, corner of Wall and High streets, at 4:15 p.m. A reception will follow

In his talk, Stewart, the James Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College, will reassess the political importance of religious activism and abolitionism leading to the Civil War, and he will scrutinize the contention of contemporary right-wing evangelical activists that the abolitionist movement provides them with powerful historical precedents and models.

The theme of this year’s Davis Lecture Series is “William Lloyd Garrison at 200: The Meanings and Legacies of American Abolitionism.”

The following is the schedule of the remaining lectures in the series:

February 13, 2006
“Putting Politics Back In: Rethinking the Problem of Political Abolitionism,”
Bruce Laurie, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst

March 27
“William Lloyd Garrison and Emancipatory Feminism in 19th-Century America,”
Lois Brown, Mount Holyoke College

April 3
“The Global Garrison: America’s Premier Radical Abolitionist and the International Response,” Richard J. Blackett, Vanderbilt University

For more information on these and other GLC programs, visit the website at www.yale.edu/glc or call 203-432-3339.

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Media Contact

Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345