Mat-Su Mayor Talis Colberg to deliver Dedication Day Polaris Lecture - Nov. 19, 2009

Tonight, Nov. 19, 7:30 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, room 120

UAA hosts the Dedication Day Polaris Lecture entitled "Abraham Lincoln and Barbara Fritchie" with Hon. Talis Colberg, Mayor of Matanuska-Susitna Borough, tonight, Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, room 120.

Mayor Colberg has been an attorney in Alaska for 25 years and has served as an adjunct history professor for the University of Alaska Anchorage Mat-Su campus since 1992.

Dedication Day is the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in which he called for the country to be dedicated to a new birth of freedom in America. Barbara Fritchie is the subject of an 1864 poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, celebrating her defiance, at age 90, of Stonewall Jackson's Confederate troops passing through Frederick, Maryland, during the Civil War. According to legend, Fritchie waved an American flag from her house, daring Jackson to shoot her; out of honor, Jackson supposedly demurred, and marched on.

The annual Dedication Day Polaris Lecture is presented by the Forty-Ninth State Fellows Program of the University Honors College. The Forty-Ninth State Fellows Program is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the UAA Polaris Society.

This lecture is free and open to the public. For additional information about this event or UAA's Polaris Lectures, please contact Stephen Haycox at (907) 786-1776 or afswh1@uaa.alaska.edu.