Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, whose 2010 book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery received the Pulitzer Prize for History, will deliver the 2014 Gregory Distinguished Lecture.
Foner’s lecture, drawn from a forthcoming book on the subject, is “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.” The lecture will take place Oct. 27 at 4 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium at the Georgia Museum of Art. It is open free to the public.
One of only two people to serve as president of the three major professional organizations—the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society of American Historians—Foner is one of the few historians to have won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes in the same year.
Foner also has served as co-curator of two prize-winning exhibitions on American history, A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln and America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War 5.
The lecture is supported by the Amanda and Greg Gregory Graduate Studies Enhancement Fund in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
