Symposium at AU highlights 19th century press, Civil War and free expression Nov. 7-9

Story courtesy Milledge Austin, Augusta University

Historians Orville Vernon Burton and Harold Holzer will give signature lectures at the 32nd Annual Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression hosted by the Department of Communication in Augusta University’s Katherine Reese Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Nov. 7-9.

Burton will present the inaugural Hazel Dicken-Garcia Distinguished Lecture for the symposium on its opening day, Thursday, Nov. 7. For a schedule, go here. He is the inaugural Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, according to a news release from Augusta University.

A prolific author and scholar, Burton’s latest work, “Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court,” which he co-authored with Armand Derfner, has been hailed as “authoritative and highly readable” by reviewer Randall Kennedy of Harvard University Law School in “The Nation,” the release continued.

The lecture is named in honor of the late Hazel Dicken-Garcia, a journalism historian at the University of Minnesota who was highly recognized for her study of 19th-century press ethics. Dicken-Garcia was one of the original founders of the symposium and one of the country’s leading authorities on 19th-century journalism history.

The symposium, formerly hosted at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga under the leadership of the late David Sachsman, PhD, West Chair of Excellence in Communications and Public Affairs, is now co-sponsored by the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians in partnership with AU’s Pamplin College, according to the release.

Holzer, winner of the 2008 National Humanities Medal, the 2015 Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the symposium’s Hazel Dicken-Garcia award, is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He will headline the conference’s second day with the keynote address. His most recent work, “Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.” has earned praise from historians such as James McPherson and Doris Kearns Goodwin for its historical perspectives and insights into an issue as timely today as it was in Antebellum and Civil War America.

The society’s three-day program also invites panel and paper submissions dealing with media, broadly defined in the 19th century. Recent topics have included the Civil War of fiction and history, slavery and abolition, coverage of presidents and legislatures, the minority and foreign language press, the illustrated press, sensationalism, reporting on the arts, and spiritualism and the supernatural.

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