The Center for Political and Economic Thought at Saint Vincent College, in cooperation with the Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics, and Government, will present a talk by Dr. Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College on Wednesday, Sept. 23 which will be the first in the Center's 2009-2010 Government and Political Education Series. The program is titled, "A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas,” and will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Fred Rogers Center. Admission is free and open to the public.

Dr. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is also the Associate Director of the Civil War Institute there. A native of Yokohama, Japan, he grew up in Springfield (Delaware County) Pennsylvania. He earned master of arts and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

He is the author of numerous books on American intellectual history and on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era, beginning with his first work, Edwards on the Will: A Century of American Theological Debate, 1750-1850 (Wesleyan University Press, 1989). His second book, For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians, 1873-1930 (Penn State University Press, 1994), won the Albert C. Outler Prize for Ecumenical Church History of the American Society of Church History. He wrote The Crisis of the American Republic: A History of the Civil War and Reconstruction for the St. Martin’s Press American History series in 1995, and followed that with an edition of Josiah G. Holland’s Life of Abraham Lincoln (1866) in 1998 for the University of Nebraska Press’s ‘Bison Books’ series of classic Lincoln biography reprints. His most important work, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm. Eerdmans, 1999), won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000. In 2003, his article, “Defending Emancipation: Abraham Lincoln and the Conkling Letter, August, 1863,” won Civil War History’s John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article of that year. More recently, he has published Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) for which he won the Lincoln Prize in 2005, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2008) which won the 2009 Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize. This year, a collection of his essays, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, was published by Southern Illinois University Press; he also published a short biography, Lincoln, in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series.

He has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, the Christian Science Monitor, the Claremont Review of Books and Books and Culture, and has been featured on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” and Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes.” He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, a member of the advisory council of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and a Research Associate of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (at the University of Pennsylvania) and is a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Union League of Philadelphia. He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1991-2), the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (1992-3), the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard University (1994-5) and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University (2002-3). Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s new edition of its American History series, and (also with The Teaching Company) has released lecture series on Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln, on American intellectual history, The American Mind, on the American Revolution, and on the history of great history-writing.

He lives in Paoli and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Debra.

The Government and Political Education Series is made possible by grants from the Aequus Institute, Massey Charitable Trust, Philip M. McKenna Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. For more information about this and other lectures in the series, contact the Center for Political and Economic Thought at Saint Vincent College at 724-805-2563.

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