Every Sunday at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.. PT)
Upcoming Book Breaks
March
March 31 - Harold Holzer on Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration
Brought Forth on This Continent traces Lincoln’s participation in immigration debates in the three decades before the Civil War. During this time, ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and voting patterns. Disputes about immigration policy split and ultimately destroyed Lincoln’s Whig Party, making possible Lincoln’s emergence as a Republican president. During his presidency, Lincoln insisted that immigrants would prove to be “a source of national wealth and strength.”
Harold Holzer serves as the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York City. He is the author, co-author, or editor of fifty-two books on Lincoln and the Civil War era and won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion.
April 7 - Frank J. Cirillo on The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union
April 14 - Tomiko Brown-Nagin on Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality
History Scholar of the Week
Middle and high school students (age 13 and up), submit your questions for one of the historians being featured on Book Breaks! If your question is chosen, you will be named History Scholar of the Week, and it will be announced live on the program! In addition, both you and your teacher will win a $50 gift certificate to the Gilder Lehrman Gift Shop. Your question can be about the book or the topic in general. Please submit only one question per program.
Submit your question here.
The deadline to submit a question for the upcoming Book Breaks is Thursday.
Book Breaks Archive
The Book Breaks archive contains more than three years of past programs featuring historians such as David Blight, Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, H. W. Brands, Peniel Joseph, Jon Meacham, Elizabeth Varon, Ken Burns, and more. Still deciding whether to subscribe? You can watch Ada Ferrer’s talk on Cuba: An American History (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) below to help you make up your mind.
View the full archive of past sessions
The Institute thanks Citizen Travelers, the nonpartisan civic engagement initiative of The Travelers Companies, Inc., for its support of Book Breaks.