Guest scholars to help campus celebrate Constitution Day

	Schaub

More than 200 years ago, in the early autumn of 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed by 39 of the nation's founding fathers. Each fall, Skidmore College and other institutions celebrate that historical moment with events designed to remind Americans of their legacy and to strengthen and refresh the foundations of citizenship.

This year, Skidmore's Constitution Day observance will begin at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, in Davis Auditorium in Palamountain Hall. The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature two short lectures comparing how Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass viewed the Constitution. The lectures will be presented by two distinguished academics, Diana Schaub of Loyola College in Maryland and Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. A shared discussion will follow.   

Morel

Morel, who is a professor of politics at Washington and Lee University, will deliver a talk titled "Lincoln and the Constitution: A Unionist for the Sake of Liberty." Lincoln believed that the Constitution and the American union were "the best means to advance…liberty." According to Morel, "Abraham Lincoln loved union because of what it could accomplish on behalf of liberty, and when he saw it being corrupted for the sake of slavery, he made it his political goal to defend the United States with words and deeds that stand as the greatest political legacy of any American president."

Morel's teaching and research interests include American government, political theory, Abraham Lincoln, and black American politics. He is the author of Lincoln's Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government (2000) and editor of Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to "Invisible Man" (2004). He is currently editing Lincoln for the Ages: Lessons for the 21st Century, and writing a book titled Lincoln, Race, and the Fragile American Republic. He has also written for the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Lincoln Lore, Journal of Supreme Court History, The Los Angeles Times,The Christian Science Monitor, First Things, and Richmond Times-Dispatch. Morel has been a guest commentator on CNN's TalkBack Live and public radio stations in New Hampshire, Virginia, and Wisconsin. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Claremont Graduate School (1994) and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in government from Claremont McKenna College.

The topic of Diana Schaub's lecture will be "Frederick Douglass and the Constitution: From Disunion to Union," which will trace the great African-American abolitionist's changing view of the Constitution. He began his career believing that the Constitution had disgracefully compromised with slavery and ought to be annulled, but eventually came to regard the Constitution as a "glorious liberty document" that might be wielded on behalf of abolition. The lecture will consider as well the effects of this change on Douglass's appreciation of the statemanship of Abraham Lincoln.

Schaub is a professor of political science at Loyola College and author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's "Persian Letters" (1995), as well as book chapters and articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Kenyon College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University (1994–95). In 2001, she was the recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters and in 2004, she was appointed to the President's Council on Bioethics. Schaub is a reviewer and essayist for a variety of publications, among them, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, The Claremont Review of Books, The American Interest, and The New Atlantis.

Skidmore's Constitution Day event is sponsored by the College's Department of Government and its First-Year Experience program. For more information, call 518-580-5240.

 

Tags: diana schaub, lucas morel, constitution day