Edna Greene Medford will present Understanding Lincoln’s World: The Challenge of Race in 19th Century Context at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 15, in Milner Library. Her presentation is part of the Fall Speaker Series.
Medford will also present African Americans and the Meaning of the Civil War at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 14, at the McLean County Museum of History, located at 200 N. Main Street in Bloomington. Both events, which are sponsored by Milner Library and the Heritage Association of McLean County, are free and open to the public. The presentations are part of the joint lecture series, Our Lincoln Heritage.
Medford, a professor at Howard University, specializes in 19th century African American history, teaching courses in Civil War and Reconstruction, Colonial America, the Jacksonian Era, and African American history. She was educated at Hampton Institute, the University of Illinois and the University of Maryland in College Park, where she received her Ph.D. in history. She has served as the director for the History of New York’s African Burial Ground Project since 1996, and edited the project’s history report. She was last in Bloomington-Normal in 2008 as part of the Lincoln Bicentennial observance, at which time she was among the featured historians in the WILL TV documentary, Lincoln: Prelude to the Presidency.
Medford is the co-author of The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views and The Price of Freedom: Slavery and the Civil War – Volumes I and II. She has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on African Americans, especially during the era of the Civil War. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of National History Day, Inc., a member of the Lincoln Forum and the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia and serves on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s Advisory Council. Medford served as a member of the Scholars’ Advisory panel for the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Education Committee of the Education Center at Mount Vernon Plantation. She has appeared on several segments of the History Channel’s Civil War Journal and on a number of C-Span programs.
Medford’s talk is sponsored in part by a grant from the Alice and Fannie Fell Trust and Milner Library. For more information, call (309) 438-3481.
