The Abraham Lincoln Association celebrated Lincoln’s birthday with a special presentation by historian Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College.  Guelzo gave an assessment of the rise, decline--and rise again of the reputation of our sixteenth President.

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Author and historian Geoffrey Perret talks about the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, and compares Lincoln’s leadership with that of Ulysses S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy.

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On the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s inauguration, the Union League Club of Chicago held a symposium with Lincoln scholars to commemorate the event.  Historian Michael Burlingame spoke at the luncheon on the topic of Lincoln and Secession and why he rejected the one compromise that may have prevented Civil War.

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William Seale, an independent scholar specializing in writing about and in the restoration of historic American buildings, compared the two White Houses in the nation between 1861 and 1865. He talked about the history and architecture of the White House in Washington, D.C., and the residence of the Confederate president in Richmond, Virginia. Then he detailed the daily lives there of President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, including the political aspects.

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Metropolitan State University professor Douglas Rossinow teaches a class on the Iran-Contra affair, which took place in the mid-1980s during the Reagan Administration. The Iran-Contra affair stems from Reagan administration officials funding the Contras - who were fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua - with money from the sale of arms to Iran. The arms were being sold to Iran in the hope of gaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon - hence the reason the affair is sometimes called as the “arm-for-hostages” scandal. Metropolitan State University is in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Forty years ago, in May 1973, a U.S. Senate Select Committee began its nationally televised hearings on Watergate. James McCord was one of the five men arrested a year earlier attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. McCord was security director for the 1972 Committee to Re-elect President Nixon, and was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in January 1973. In this portion, Committee Chair Sam Ervin questioned McCord about his January 1973 conversation with Jack Caulfield, a former White House aide.

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Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a former slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. She was part of a pro-Union underground spy ring run by Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of a prominent Richmond citizen. In this program, authors Elizabeth Varon and Lois Leveen talk about the life and story of Ms. Bowser, as well as her relationship with Ms. Van Lew. The two authors also discuss how they wrote and researched their books. The event took place at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

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Saul Cornell discusses his book "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America."  He explores the opposing sides of the gun control debate, arguing that both base their opinions on a flawed understanding of the second amendment.

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“Operation Gold” was a 1950s project conducted by the CIA and the British Intelligence Service to tap into Soviet communications by tunneling from West Berlin into East Berlin, Germany. Known as “Operation Stopwatch” by the British, the 1,500 foot tunnel was active for eleven months, and netted about 40,000 hours of East German telephone conversations - even though the KGB knew about the tunnel before it was built. Retired CIA officer Lou Mehrer tells the story of the Berlin Tunnel at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum in West Branch, Iowa.

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