Lincoln's unfinished work: The new birth of freedom from generation to generation

Walter Edgar's Journal

Abraham Lincoln, February 9, 1864(Anthony Berger / Library of Congress)

This week, we offer you an encore of an episode from our broadcast archive: A fascinating conversation with Dr. Vernon Burton, the Judge Matthe w J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University, and Dr. Peter Eisenstadt, affiliate scholar in the Department of History at Clemson University.

Walter will be talking with Peter and Vernon about their book, Lincoln’s Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation, a collection of essays from a conference that they directed at Clemson University which discussed many of the dimensions of Lincoln’s “unfinished work” as a springboard to explore the task of political and social reconstruction in the United States from 1865 to the present day.

The conference was not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigated all three topics – as does our conversation.