Yale scholar to examine Congressional violence in talk

Joanne B. Freeman

"The Field of Blood:  Congressional Violence in Antebellum America" is the title of the 2009 Ronald J. Fiscus Lecture at Skidmore College, to be presented by Yale University Professor of History Joanne B. Freeman.

Free and open to the public, the lecture will begin at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.  Sponsors of the event are Skidmore's Department of Government, First-Year Experience Program, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.

South Carolina Rep. Joseph Wilson earned the attention of millions of Americans in September when, during a nationally televised speech by President Barack Obama to a joint session of Congress, he shouted, "You lie!" to the president. Soon after, the congressman apologized privately to the president but refused to apologize on the floor of the House. The outburst earned Wilson a formal rebuke from his House colleagues.

In an opinion essay published Sept. 18 in The New York Times, Freeman explained, "Congress has a long and storied culture of apology, to go along with its long and storied culture of insult — and the two traditions are inextricably bound together.
 
"Congressional insults—and apologies—had their heyday in the first half of the 19th century. Much as we envision the pre-Civil War era as the golden age of Congressional oratory delivered by the likes of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, alongside this eloquence was a generous helping of rough-and-tumble brawling," she added.
 
A specialist in the political history and culture of revolutionary and early national America, Freeman has a special interest in honor culture and dueling.  Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2001) won the "Best Book of the Year" prize by the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic in 2002.  Her research on Hamilton has taken her to St. Kitts, Nevis, and to Scotland, among other places, and given her the opportunity to shoot a black-powder dueling pistol.
 
Her published work includes the book Alexander Hamilton:  Writings (Library of America, 2001), which she edited, and "Dueling as Politics:  Reinterpreting the Burr-Hamilton Duel," published in the William and Mary Quarterly, April 1996.  She is currently working on a book about political violence and the culture of Congress in antebellum America.
 
A graduate of Pomona College and the University of Virginia, Freeman joined the Yale faculty in 1997 and has been a professor there since 2002.
 
Skidmore's Ronald J. Fiscus lecture was inaugurated in 1991 to honor the late Ronald J. Fiscus, a faculty member at the College from 1980 to his death in 1990. Professor Fiscus was a constitutional law specialist and a key contributor to the development of a minor in law and society at Skidmore.