TONIGHT: Polaris Lecture on Lincoln and the enduring American Frontier

Tonight, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m.
UAA/APU Consortium Library, Room 307

Professor Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will deliver a special lecture in observance of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Polaris Lecture organizers note that in observing this special birth date of Lincoln,

"We should celebrate not only his eloquence and moral leadership during the nation's worst political crisis, but we should remember that this most admired of American presidents was also a man of the frontier, a common man elevated to the office without the pedigree or breeding possessed by most of his predecessors.

In a very real sense, Lincoln, in his person, embodied an understanding of America as a field of opportunity, an enduring frontier whose social structure is fluid and unstable, with the capacity to elicit profound expressions of democratic virtue in even the most ordinary individuals. This is a defining potentiality of America that we are in danger of losing, as we become a more organized, more credentialed, and less loose-jointed society."

Professor McClay is the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee and the author of books that include Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994), which won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians, The Student's Guide to U.S. History (2001), Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (2007).

The Polaris Lecture will be given tonight, Feb. 13 at 7:30 p.m. in the UAA/APU Consortium Library, Room 307. This event is open to the public and free of charge.