September 29, 2022, 7 p.m. CT (Zoom webinar)

Join us for the first installment of “Warning Signs: Lincoln’s Response to Rising Threats to Freedom, Justice, and Democracy.” This project, developed with generous support from Iron Mountain, draws on primary sources and experts to create new resources for the public to explore issues Abraham Lincoln witnessed—polarization, political violence, and more—and how he responded. Understanding history provides important context to challenges we face in our own time.

This program will feature screenings of “Warning Signs” film footage and a discussion led by our CEO Erin Carlson Mast with political scholar Dr. Lucas Morel on Lincoln’s views of our nation’s founding principles and ways they informed his response to prewar events like the Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska Act. Dr. Lucas Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics at Washington and Lee University. He is also a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society and serves on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which will plan activities to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America.

They will be joined by Adena Barnette-Miller, an award-winning educator who participated in the Warning Signs project and is a former graduate student of Dr. Morels. Barnette-Miller was named the 2021 West Virginia History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute. She previously won the James Madison Foundation Fellowship, which funded her master’s degree in American history and government from Ashland University in Ohio, and serves as President-Elect of th West Virginia Council for Social Studies.