Lincoln author and scholar Dr. Michael Burlingame presents 2015 T.W. Samuels Lecture Feb. 5

[February 03, 2015]  DECATUR - Dr. Michael Burlingame, holder of the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, will present “What New Can Be Said about Abraham Lincoln?” at 7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 5, in Kaeuper Hall, Perkinson Music Center, on Millikin’s campus. The event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations required.

Dr. Burlingame is an internationally renowned scholar who has published 12 books on the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. His work, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” is a two-volume biography that was 25 years in the making. The book won the 2010 Lincoln Prize, sponsored by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History and Gettysburg College, for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln.

Dr. Burlingame’s most recent books include “A Day Long to be Remembered: Lincoln in Gettysburg” (2013), “Lincoln and the Civil War” (2011), and “Abraham Lincoln Traveled This Way: The America Lincoln Knew” (2011). He is currently working on a book about Lincoln’s emotional life, a volume in the Concise Lincoln Library published by the Southern Illinois University Press.

Dr. Burlingame was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. As a freshman at Princeton University, he took the Civil War course taught by the eminent Lincolnian David Herbert Donald, who took him under his wing and made him a research assistant. When Professor Donald moved on to Johns Hopkins University, Burlingame upon graduation from Princeton, followed him to that institution. There he received his Ph.D. In 1968 he joined the History Department at Connecticut College where he taught until retiring in 2001 as the May Buckley Sadowski Professor of History Emeritus. He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Springfield in 2009.

Dr. Burlingame has also edited several volumes of Lincoln primary source materials including “An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays,” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996); “Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) co-edited with John R. Turner Ettlinger; “Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and many more.

Dr. Burlingame has received the Abraham Lincoln Association Book Prize (1996), the Lincoln Diploma of Honor from Lincoln Memorial University (1998), Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College (2001), and was inducted into the Lincoln Academy of Illinois in 2009.

Dr. Burlingame’s presentation is the 2015 T.W. Samuels Lecture. The T.W. Samuels Lecture Series was created in 1977 in honor of attorney T.W. Samuels, senior partner in the Decatur law firm of Samuels, Miller, Schroeder, Jackson and Sly. Samuels was active in Decatur community affairs until his death in 1989 at age 103. Samuels’ sons, William J. Samuels of Menlo Park, Calif., and the late Dr. Thomas W. Samuels Jr., created an endowment fund to finance the series in recognition of their father. The endowment is used to bring great thinkers and speakers to Millikin for the purpose of community enrichment.

[Media Relations, Millikin University]