Past McMurtry Lectures
1978—Richard N. Current on “Unity, Ethnicity and Abraham Lincoln”
1979—Donald E. Fehrenbacher on “The Minor Affair: An Adventure in Forgery & Detection”
1980—Harold M. Hyman on “Lincoln’s Reconstruction: Neither Failure of Vision or Vision of Failure”
1981—Robert V. Bruce on “Lincoln and the Riddle of Death”
1982—Stephen B. Oates on “Builders of the Dream: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
1983—Ralph Geoffrey Newman on “Preserving Lincoln for the Ages: Collectors, Collections & our Sixteenth President
1984—Herman Belz on “Lincoln and the Constitution: The Dictatorship Question Reconsidered”
1985—James M. McPherson on “How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors”
1986—Frank E. Vandiver on “The Long Loom of Lincoln”
1987—John Y. Simon on “House Divided: Lincoln and His Father”
1988—Jean H. Baker on “’Not Much of Me’: Abraham Lincoln as a Typical American”
1989—Robert W. Johannsen on “Lincoln and the South in 1860”
1990—John T. Hubbell on “War and Freedom and Abraham Lincoln”
1991—Merrill D. Peterson on “’This Grand Pertinacity’: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence”
1992—Phillip Shaw Paludan on “’The Better Angels of Our Nature’: Lincoln, Propaganda and Public Opinion in The North During the American Civil War”
1995—David Herbert Donald on “’Events Have Controlled Me’: The Fatalism of Abraham Lincoln”
1996—Harold Holzer on “The Mirror Image of Civil War Memory: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in Popular Prints”
1997—Paul Simon on “Lincoln the State Legislator”
1998—Douglas Wilson on “Herndon’s Dilemma: Abraham Lincoln and the Privacy Issue”
1999—William Lee Miller on “He Will be Good, But God Knows When”
2000—Frank Williams on “Edward Bates and Abraham Lincoln: The Attorney General and the Attorney President”
2001—Lerone Bennett on “Forced Into Glory”
2002—Michael Beschloss on “An Evening with Michael Beschloss: Political Historian Specializing in the American Presidency”
2003—Gabor Boritt on “Honky Lincoln? A response to Lerone Bennett”
2004—Allen C. Guelzo on “The Emancipation Moment: Lincoln’s other ‘first of January’”
2005—William D. Pederson on “The Impact of Abraham Lincoln’s Constitutional Legacy: A Global Outlook”
2006—James O. Horton on “Naturally Anti-slavery: Lincoln, Race, and the Complexity of American Liberty”
2007—Doris Kearns Goodwin on “Team of Rivals”
2008—Joseph Fornieri on “Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith”
2010—Michael Burlingame on “Abraham Lincoln: A Biographer’s Quest”
2011—Ronald C. White, Jr. on “’I am almost ready to say’…Abraham Lincoln’s Diary”
2012—Gary Gallagher on “A Real Lost Cause: The Disappearance of Union from the Memory of the Civil War”
2013—James M. McPherson on “Lincoln and the West”
2014—Eric Foner on “The Emancipation of Abraham Lincoln”
2015—Harold Holzer on “1863 vs. 1865: What a Difference Two Years Make”
2016—Frank J. Williams on “Abraham Lincoln: Indianan and the West”
2017—Richard Brookhiser on “Abraham Lincoln and His Fathers”
2018—Ronald C. White on “A New Vision for America: Re-Thinking Ulysses S. Grant”
2019—Jay Winik on “April 1865: The Month that Saved America”
2020—Allen Guelzo on “Lincoln and Democracy”
2021—David S. Reynolds on “Influences that Shaped Abraham Lincoln”
2022—Ronald C. White on “Lincoln in Private”
2023—Edna Greene Medford on “The Pursuit of Freedom in a ‘Free’ State: The Emancipation Proclamation’s Significance to African Americans in Indiana”
2024—Brian Matthew Jordan on “‘Held in War’s Grasp’: The Ordeals of Veteranhood After the Civil War”
2025—Steve Inskeep on “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America”