Lincoln’s Dreams

On Thursday, October 17, Professor Jonathan W. White will lead us in an examination of the dreams of the sixteenth President of the United States.  Abraham Lincoln dreamed three times of his impending assassination.  Or did he?  Dr. White will explore some of the myths and legends surrounding one of our nation’s greatest leaders by discussing Lincoln’s famous dreams about his own death.  Lincoln believed that “Dreams possessed at least some predictive capacity.  They weren’t actual revelations of the future, but they gave one a sense, however murky, of what might come to pass.” 

Speaker: Professor Jonathan W. White is an assistant professor of American Studies Fellow at Christopher Newport University’s Center for American Studies.  He is the author of “Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman” (Louisiana State University Press, 2011).  His next book, “Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln” is scheduled for publication in Spring 2014.  This is Dr. White’s third appearance at the Library having previously spoken in June 2011 on the “Sesquicentennial Commemoration of Ex Parte Merryman” and in May 2012 on “The Peculiarly Insignificant Role of the Supreme Court in the Civil War.”   (See “The Strangely Insignificant Role of the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2013), 211-238).

Place: Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. Courthouse – 100 North Calvert Street – Main Reading Room of the Bar Library (Room 618).

Time: 5:00 p.m., Thursday, October 17, 2013, with a wine & cheese reception immediately following.

Invitees: Members of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and their guests, judges, employees of Baltimore City and its courts, courthouse employees, government lawyers, public interest lawyers, law librarians, law and college faculty and students.  Others may attend on payment of a $20 admission charge or upon application for Bar Library membership.  All proceeds collected will go to the Bar Library’s Honorable Harry A. Cole Self-Help Center.