Dr. Jacob K. Friefeld (Director)
Dr. Friefeld came to the Center from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and his research has focused on Abraham Lincoln's western legacy. His recent book, The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration, tells the epic story of Black Americans homesteading in the Great Plains after the Civil War. The First Migrants was a finalist for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History book award and the Western Writers of America book award for history. His first book, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, examines the Homestead Act of 1862, one of the most important social policies ever enacted in the United States.
Friefeld earned a doctorate in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies. He was also the project manager for the UNL History Harvest, a community-centered digital public history project. Prior to this, he earned a master’s degree in history from Loyola University Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
When not busy helping everyone see themselves reflected in Lincoln's legacy, Friefeld most enjoys spending a summer day at Wrigley Field.
Dr. Michael Burlingame
Michael Burlingame, holder of the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at University of Illinois Springfield, is the author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln and the Civil War, as well as the editor of many collections of Lincoln primary source materials. A graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Connecticut College in New London for many years before joining the faculty at University of Illinois Springfield in 2009. That year, The Atlantic rated Abraham Lincoln: A Life one of the five best books of the year, and in the New York Review of Books, the dean of Civil War historians, James McPherson, wrote that Burlingame “knows more about Lincoln than any other living person.”
Dr. Graham A. Peck
Prof. Peck specializes in antebellum American political history, and particularly in Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and the origins of the Civil War, but he is also very interested in the intersection of scholarship and other forms of history. For this reason he wrote, directed, and produced a feature-length film on Douglas for use at the Douglas Tomb State Historic Site in Chicago. The film features performances by leading Douglas and Lincoln reenactors, interviews with five historians of the Civil War, and hundreds of nineteenth-century images. More recently, Prof. Peck co-directed Lincoln & Douglas: Touring Illinois in Turbulent Times, a 47-minute documentary road film about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which he made with art professor Nathan Peck during the tumultuous Covid summer of 2020. The film features five Lincoln or Douglas reenactors and several interviews, including one with a BLM activist in Springfield who successfully urged removal of Douglas’ statue from the grounds of the Illinois State Capitol.
