Renowned Scholars to Highlight Thirty-Second Annual Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press, the Civil War, and Freedom of Expression

Augusta, Ga. — Esteemed 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 Freedom of Expression at Augusta University.

Burton will present the inaugural Hazel Dicken-Garcia Lecture for the Symposium on its opening day, Thursday, Nov. 7. He is the Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History and Professor of Pan-African Studies, Sociology and Anthropology, and Computer Science at Clemson University and recipient of the Southern Historical Association’s John Hope Franklin Lifetime Achievement Award

A prolific author and scholar, Burton’s latest work, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court 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 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 nineteenth century press ethics. Dicken-Garcia was one of the original founders of the Symposium and one of the country’s leading authorities on nineteenth century journalism history.

The Symposium, formerly hosted at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga under the leadership of the late Dr. David Sachsman, West Chair of Excellence in Communications and Public Affairs, is now co-sponsored by the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians in partnership with Augusta University’s Pamplin College the Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

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 nineteenth 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.