York College of PA to host Oct. 25 annual Langston Lincoln Lecture

York College of Pennsylvania will host a discussion about Ulysses S. Grant as President Abraham Lincoln’s protégé at 7 p.m., Oct. 25, in the Weinstock Lecture Hall, Willman Business Center. The talk by Dr. Andrew Lang, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University, is this year’s annual Langston Lincoln Lecture. A reception will begin at 6:30 p.m., and a book signing will follow the talk. All are open to the public free of charge.

One of Lang’s current book projects, from which this year's annual Langston Lincoln Lecture draws, explores how President Grant channeled Lincoln's nationalist legacy during the tumult of Reconstruction. The project is based on the keynote address that Lang delivered at the U.S. Grant Bicentennial Commemoration in March 2022.

Lang’s other current project is an intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln’s concept of Union and philosophy of history. It explores how Lincoln crafted a narrative of American nationalism amid a contentious contemporary dialogue on the nature of national life.

Lang specializes in the history of nineteenth-century America, using the era of the American Civil War as a lens through which to investigate the century’s dynamic setting. His most recent book, “A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era” (2021), is published in the University of North Carolina Press’s landmark series, Littlefield History of the Civil War Era. From a field of more than 90 submissions, the book ranked as one of seven finalists for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which stands among the foremost awards in American historical scholarship.

The Society of Civil War Historians presented his first book, “In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America” (2017), with the 2018 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The $50,000 prize recognizes “the best book published on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War,” measured by original scholarship and literary style. More than 50 books competed for this annual award.

Lang serves on the Executive Council of the Society of Civil War Historians, the field’s flagship professional organization. He also sits on advisory boards of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History (University of Virginia), the American Civil War Museum (Richmond, Virginia), and the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library.