Carthage College, Lincoln Presidential Foundation, The Lincoln Forum, and The Civil War Museum are proud to present the fourth annual Lincoln Symposium, Friday, April 24, through Saturday, April 25.
$50 Registration Fee
REGISTER HERE
Questions? Please reach out to Dana Kroll at Dkroll@carthage.edu or 262-551-5706.
For more information visit HERE.
Schedule of Events
Friday, April 24
Raymond McKoski
David Davis: A Lincoln Loyalist and Impartial Jurist
5:00 p.m., Civil War Museum
Dinner
6:00 p.m., Civil War Museum
William Davis
The Making of the Confederacy — How the South Created a New Government
7:30 p.m., Kenosha Civil War Museum
Saturday, April 25
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Abraham Lincoln and the Meaning of the Civil War
9:30 a.m., Campbell Student Union Auditorium
Saladin Ambar
Murder on the Mississippi: 1000 Days That Shaped Abraham Lincoln
10:30 a.m., Campbell Student Union Auditorium
Elizabeth Varon
Clara Barton’s Civil War Lecture Tour and the “Won Cause”
11:30 a.m., Campbell Student Union Auditorium
Lunch
12:30 p.m.
Jason Emerson
“They Understood Each Other Thoroughly”: A Look at the Lincoln Marriage
1:45 p.m., Campbell Student Union Auditorium
Erin Mast (Lincoln Presidential Foundation)
In conversation with Saladin Ambar
2:45 p.m., Campbell Student Union Auditorium
Meet the Speakers
Raymond McKoski
In 2010, Ray retired after twenty-six years as a state court judge in the northeast tip of Illinois, about 40 miles from Chicago. Since then, Ray has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, teaching courses in legal ethics, appellate advocacy, and the jury process. He is a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of American Legal Studies and has served on ethics committees of the National Center for State Courts, the American Bar Association, the American Judges Association, the Illinois Supreme Court, and the Illinois State Bar Association. Ray has authored nearly two dozen articles on legal and judicial ethics, focusing on the historical evolution of rules of conduct governing lawyers and judges. His book, Judges in Street Clothes: Acting Ethically Off-the-Bench, explores the ethical, practical, and constitutional implications of a judge’s off-bench activities.
Ray’s initial foray into the life of nineteenth century central Illinois judge David Davis appeared in a 2011 Kentucky Law Journal article, “Reestablishing Actual Impartiality as the Fundamental Value of Judicial Ethics: Lessons from ‘Big Judge Davis.’” In July 2025, the University of Illinois Press published his second book, David Davis, Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Judge. Ray graduated summa cum laude from the DePaul University College of Law and, as a lawyer, argued cases at every level of state and federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court.
William Davis
Currently professor of history at Virginia Tech, William C. Davis has written over fifty books, most about the American Civil War. He has won the Jefferson Davis Prize for southern history three times, the Jules F. Landry Award for Southern history once, and has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
For several years, he was the editor of the magazine Civil War Times Illustrated. He has also served as a consultant on the A&E television series Civil War Journal.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author, among other books, of the Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, and, most recently, Fighting With the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War.
Saladin Ambar
Saladin Ambar is Professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. He is the winner of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Best Book Award in Government and Politics for Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, and his Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era is in development for a feature film. Prof. Ambar served as Co-Director of the Democracy Committee for New Jersey’s Reparations Council and was a contributor for the Lincoln Presidential Foundation’s docuseries on the Lyceum Address. He has been a fact-checker and contributor for the Smithsonian Channel, CNN’s Race for the White House, and PBS’s MetroFocus. His sixth book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln (Diversion Books), was published in October 2025. Dr. Ambar is the father of teenage triplets and lives in Philadelphia.
Elizabeth Varon
Elizabeth Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. She is the author of six books, including Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, which won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Her most recent book Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic. The book won the inaugural American Battlefield Trust Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times biography prize, among other honors. Varon’s current project is a biography of humanitarian Clara Barton.
Jason Emerson
Jason Emerson is the author or editor of eight books, including Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln and The Madness of Mary Lincoln. Learn more about his work at www.jasonemersonhistorian.com.
This event is in partnership with Carthage College, Lincoln Presidential Foundation, The Lincoln Forum, and the Kenosha Civil War Museum.
