October 18, 2022, 7 p.m. CT (Zoom webinar)

Join us for the second 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 with political and constitutional historian Dr. Rachel Shelden on Lincoln’s political evolution, his response to Supreme Court decisions, and the Court's impacts on democracy and freedom prior to the Civil War. The discussion will be followed by audience Q&A.  

Rachel Shelden is Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. Her research and teaching interests include slavery and abolition, the Civil War, the U.S. South, and political and constitutional history. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, & the Coming of the Civil War and co-editor of A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History. Her current book project, The Political Supreme Court, examines the political world of U.S. Supreme Court justices from the early nineteenth century to the 1890s.​