Wide Awake: Lunch Book Discussion with Jon Grinspan

Grinspan and Friefeld Discuss "Wide Awake"

Join the UIS Center for Lincoln Studies and Lincoln Home National Historic Site for a lunch discussion featuring Jon Grinspan, author of Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.

Grinspan will be joined in this discussion by Jacob K. Friefeld, director of the UIS Center for Lincoln Studies. The event will be held at the Lincoln Home NHS Visitor Center and is free and open to the public.

Historic document background with text: "Lincoln & America 250".

WHAT: The University of Illinois Springfield Center for Lincoln Studies will host the 24th annual Beaumont Endowed Lincoln Legacy Lecture, “Lincoln and America 250,” featuring Jon Grinspan, the curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Saladin Ambar, professor of political science and senior scholar at the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University. A book signing will follow the program.

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The following story was published by Capitol City Now/WTAX Radio on Aug. 5, 2026.

The University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) has been chosen to write the historical content for a permanent exhibit on the 1908 Springfield race riot.

According to a news release, the Illinois State Museum Society awarded the contract to a team from UIS’s Center for Lincoln Studies and History Department. The exhibit will be part of the new Springfield Sangamon County Transportation HUB, currently under construction downtown and scheduled to open in 2027.

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People standing near a tall, damaged building with trees in the background.

A UIS team will develop historical content for a permanent exhibit on the 1908 Springfield race riot at the new Springfield Sangamon County Transportation HUB.

A woman with curly red hair, wearing a floral jacket and hoop earrings.

WHAT: The University of Illinois Springfield Center for Lincoln Studies, in partnership with Juneteenth Inc., the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the UIS Institute for Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice, will host a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, host and executive producer of the Hulu docuseries The 1619 Project, as part of its Juneteenth Lecture Series.

WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Monday, June 15

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The Center for Lincoln Studies (CLS) is dedicated to engaging with UIS’s talented faculty. The Faculty Fellows program engages faculty to become the core of the Center’s intellectual community along with the Center’s two affiliate faculty. The faculty fellows will participate in Center programs and projects (when applicable) and the Center will amplify fellows’ work through its website and social media and provide travel funds to aid faculty research.

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Statue of Abraham Lincoln with the UIS colonnade in the background.

This story was updated on Oct. 14 to reflect a change in the speaker lineup.

WHAT: The University of Illinois Springfield Center for Lincoln Studies will host the 23rd annual Beaumont Endowed Lincoln Legacy Lecture, “Lincoln and the Age of Disruption,” featuring Colleen Shogan, the 11th archivist of the United States, and author Jason Emerson. The lecture is free and open to the public.

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Legacy of Resilience: Black Springfield 1900-1910

The Legacy of Resilience project explores the Black community in Springfield, Illinois, before, during, and in the wake of the August 1908 race riot. In the past, there have been attempts to interpret the violence of this race massacre, but little work has been done to understand and interpret the Black Springfield community that was impacted by this violence. This project centers the Black Springfield community—their joy, their strife, and their everyday lives—as a way to understand what was lost through violence as well as the community’s resilience.

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