Historian/educator James Oakes will discuss his new book, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 6 p.m., at Raritan Valley Community College.
The event, which is free of charge and open to the public, will be held in the Conference Center at the College’s Branchburg Campus.
Oakes is a Distinguished Professor of History and a Humanities Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Sponsored by RVCC’s Department of Humanities, Social Science and Education, the lecture is part of a yearlong series titled “Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle.” The series is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Freedom National offers a groundbreaking history of emancipation that joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South. It shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery.
Oakes shows that Lincoln’s landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation. It triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army. But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freed men left behind the shifting Union lines.
Freedom National earned the prestigious Lincoln Prize, which Professor Oakes also received for his previous book, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner has called Freedom National “the best account ever written of the complex historical process known as emancipation.”
For additional information about Freedom National and James Oakes, visit books.wwnorton.com/books/Freedom-National/. For information about the RVCC lecture, contact Dr. Carl Lindskoog at email@example.com.