Join Lincoln Presidential Foundation, in partnership with Southern Illinois University Press, on Thursday, May 7, 2026, for a special U.S. 250th Anniversary panel discussion featuring contributors to the Concise Lincoln Library book series by SIU Press, including series editor Sylvia Frank Rodrigue and scholars John C. Rodrigue, Edna Greene Medford, and Lucas E. Morel.
This exciting series brings together expert scholars to elaborate on the life, times, and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Through short, focused books, each concentrating on a different area of Lincoln’s life and career, the Concise Lincoln Library brings fresh perspectives to well-known topics, investigates previously overlooked subjects, and explores in greater depth topics that have not yet received book-length treatment.
Each book gives readers the opportunity to quickly achieve basic knowledge of a Lincoln-related topic. In an effort to make new scholarship accessible to the widest audience possible, the books carry minimal endnotes and historiography and are written in a style that is easy for anyone to understand. In-depth yet accessible, the Concise Lincoln Library appeals to both the novice and the Lincoln scholar.
“Southern Illinois University Press’s Concise Lincoln Library series is a unique contribution to the study of Abraham Lincoln and his impact on American History. These pithy insights into important topics of Lincoln's life and times, each written by a noted Lincoln scholar, has allowed the general public—young as well as old—to access and understand perhaps the most important era in America's past.”—Daniel R. Weinberg, Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc.
SIU Press received the Wendy Allen Award for Institutional Excellence from the Lincoln Forum in honor of the Concise Lincoln Library.
Series co-editors Richard W. Etulain, Sara Vaughn Gabbard, and Sylvia Frank Rodrigue received the Harold Holzer Lincoln Forum Book Prize for their work in editing the Concise Lincoln Library.
The Concise Lincoln Library was made possible in part through generous donations by the Leland E. and LaRita R. Boren Trust and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation.
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Build Your Concise Lincoln Library! Visit SIU Press HERE and purchase 5+ copies of Concise Lincoln Library books and receive a 40% discount (use promo code BUILDCLL40). Purchase 10+ copies of Concise Lincoln Library books and receive a 50% discount (use promo code BUILDCLL50).
Panelists:
Edna Greene Medford, Ph.D., is a Howard University Emeritus Professor of History and former associate provost for faculty affairs. She researches and publishes in the fields of African American history, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Lincoln presidency. She is the author of Lincoln and Emancipation and co-author of The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views. She edited Historical Perspectives of the African Burial Ground: New York Blacks and the Diaspora, volume 3 of The New York African Burial Ground: Unearthing the African Presence in Colonial New York. She is also the author of numerous refereed articles and book chapters that have appeared in both national and international publications.
Lucas E. Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. His publications include Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln; Lincoln and the American Founding; Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages; and Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government. He is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance; former president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute; a consultant on exhibits at the National Archives, National Park Service, and Library of Congress; moderator of high school teacher workshops for the Jack Miller Center, Hillel-Civic Spirit, Ashbrook Center, and Gilder Lehrman Institute; and member of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning the 2026 national celebration of the birth of the United States.
John C. Rodrigue is the Lawrence and Theresa Salameno Professor in the Department of History at Stonehill College. In addition to his volume in the Concise Lincoln Library, Lincoln and Reconstruction, he is the author of Freedom’s Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, which received the John L. Nau III Book Prize in American Civil War Era History from the University of Virginia and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. He is also the author of Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880, and co-editor of one of the volumes in the series Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.
Sylvia Frank Rodrigue is the executive editor of Southern Illinois University Press, for which she acquires history and criminology books. She is a coeditor of the Concise Lincoln Library book series. Through her business Sylverlining she coaches authors and copyedits nonfiction and fiction manuscripts. She served as editor-in-chief at Louisiana State University Press and associate editor at Stackpole Books. Rodrigue is the coauthor of Images of America: Baton Rouge and Historic Baton Rouge.