2012 Spring Symposium Announced: Creating an Army to Preserve the Nation

The U.S. Capitol Historical Society presents: Creating an Army to Preserve the Nation

Ninth annual conference in the series “The National Capital in a Nation Divided: Congress and the District of Columbia Confront Sectionalism and Slavery”

Keynote Address and Reception
Thursday, May 3, 2012
6:30-8:30 pm
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room G50
Speaker: Catherine Clinton, Queen’s University (“Mary Lincoln vs. Congress: A Thirty Years War”)

Courtesy Library of Congress

Symposium
Friday, May 4, 2012 (scroll down for topics and schedule)
9 am-5 pm (registration begins at 8:30 am)
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room G50
Symposium Director: Paul Finkelman, Albany Law School

Featured Speakers

L. Diane Barnes, Youngstown State University

Iver Bernstein, Washington University

Fergus M. Bordewich, Author of America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union

Jenny Bourne, Carleton College

Mischa Honeck, German Historical Institute

Chandra Manning, Georgetown University

Brooks Simpson, Arizona State University

Nikki Taylor, University of Cincinnati

Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room G-50
C and 1st Streets NE
Washington, DC
Union Station or Capitol South metro

Please remember that temperatures in meeting rooms can vary greatly; dress appropriately.

Friday Program

9:00 am: Fergus M. Bordewich
“The Radicals’ War: How the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War Tried to Shape the Course of the Civil War”

9:45 am: Jenny Bourne
“We Are Coming, Father Abraham! But How Will You Pay for Us?”

10:30 am: Break

10:45 am: Nikki Taylor
“A Question of Citizenship: Cincinnati’s Black Brigade”

11:30 am: L. Diane Barnes
“Make Mine an Abolition War: George L. Stearns, Frederick Douglass, and the Black Soldier”

12:15 pm: Lunch Break

1:30 pm: Brooks Simpson
“The Third Star: Lincoln, Congress, Grant, and the Lieutenant General Act”

2:15 pm: Mischa Honeck
“Men of Principle: The German American War for the Union”

3:00 pm: Break

3:15 pm: Chandra Manning
“Who Counts and Who Decides? In Which The Union Army, the U.S. Congress, and Slave Refugees Reinvent the Relationship between the U.S. Government and Individual People”

4:00 pm: Iver Bernstein
“To Die at Home: The Federal Draft and Draft Riots, the Brothers’ War, the Traffic in Persons, and the Traumatic Foundations of Imperial Crisis in the Age of the Civil War”