The program will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence through a presentation by Joshua Claybourn titled “Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Idea.”
Drawing from his forthcoming book Lincoln’s Compass, Claybourn traces Lincoln’s lifelong engagement with the Declaration, from his frontier youth to his final presidential speeches. The talk shows how Lincoln treated equality as a guiding principle for self-government and why his reading of the Declaration still speaks to the demands and limits of constitutional democracy.
