Dr. Allen Guelzo - Keynote & Public Speaker

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The Torch Podcast with Allen Guelzo | The Great Courses

United States Marine Band and Allen Guelzo - "A Lincoln Portrait"

A Conversation with Allen Guelzo

Speech Topics

What has caused our college campuses to turn their backs on freedom of expression and become havens of intolerance? How can Americans recover control, of their public spaces for the genuine diversity of opinion that makes democracy thrive?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denounced the attempts of conservatives to ‘weaponize’ the First Amendment. But isn’t the First Amendment intended to be a weapon for protecting liberty of opinion? What are the right (and wrong) uses of this ‘weapon’ like no other?

One generation’s heroes can quickly become the next generation’s deplorables. How should we remember former heroes that we’re told we can no longer regard as heroes? What should we do with monuments and other public reminders (like statues of Confederate generals – especially Robert E. Lee)? Is there a rational way to approach the problem of offense that doesn’t become mere historical vandalism?

Lincoln came to presidency with some remarkable leadership traits. But what made him a statesman was his clear-sighted understand of the rule of law, and how it provides the middle zone of safety between tyranny and anarchy.

For most of our history, Americans have admired their country as an exceptional nation. But what are the three vital components of that exceptional status? Are they still meaningful today, and can we restore them to their proper place?

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest leader the United States has enjoyed since its founding. Yet, he had almost nothing in his resume that any executive search firm would glance at twice. How did this child of the raw American frontier become the Great Emancipator and the Savior of the Union? And what are the seven keys to his leadership which show the way to greatness?

Biography

Dr. Allen C Guelzo is a New York Times best-selling author, American historian, and commentator on public issues. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, National Affairs, First Things, U.S. News & World Report, The Weekly Standard, Washington Monthly, National Review, Daily Beast, and The Claremont Review of Books, and has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” and “On Point,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2008), Meet the Press: Press Pass with David Gregory, The Civil War: The Untold Story (Great Divide Pictures, 2014), Race to the White House: Lincoln vs. Douglas (CNN, 2016), Legends and Lies: The Civil War (Fox, 2018) and Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes.” In 2010, he was nominated for a Grammy Award along with David Straithern and Richard Dreyfuss for their production of the entirety of THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES (BBC Audio).

He is the Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and Director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative in Politics and Statesmanship. He holds the MA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania, plus honorary degrees from Lincoln College and Lincoln Memorial University.

Among his many award-winning publications, he is the author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm. Eerdmans, 1999), which won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize, for 2005; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2008), on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; a volume of essays, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) which won a Certificate of Merit from the Illinois State Historical Association in 2010; and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series. In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction with Oxford University Press, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg (for the 150th anniversary of the battle), Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion won the Lincoln Prize for 2014, the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Round Table, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table. His most recent publications are Robert E. Lee: A Life (Knopf, 2021), Redeeming the Great Emancipator (Harvard University Press, 2016) which originated as the 2012 Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, and Reconstruction: A Concise History (Oxford University Press).

He is one of Power Line’s 100 “Top Professors” in America. In 2009, he delivered the Commonwealth Fund Lecture at University College, London, on “Lincoln, Cobden and Bright: The Braid of Liberalism in the 19th-Century’s Transatlantic World.” He has been awarded the Lincoln Medal of the Union League Club of New York City, the Lincoln Award of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and the Lincoln Award of the Union League of Philadelphia, in addition to the James Q. Wilson Award for Distinguished Scholarship on the Nature of a Free Society. In 2018, he was named a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and was one of three winners of the Bradley Prize. He has been a Fellow of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and currently serves as a Trustee of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.

Together with Patrick Allitt and Gary W. Gallagher, he team-taught The Teaching Company’s American History series, and as well as courses on Abraham Lincoln (Mr. Lincoln, 2005) on American intellectual history (The American Mind, 2006), the American Revolution (2007), and the Founders (America’s Founding Fathers, 2017). From 2006 to 2013, he served as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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