How the founders fathered President Lincoln

In an appearance on campus, Richard Brookhiser, the author of several best-selling studies of the founding fathers, will explore the timeless ideas and principles of the true “greatest generation”—the founders—and their chief epigone, Abraham Lincoln.

Far from being an antiquated relic or mere historical curiosity, the founders’ vision of a “new order for the ages” deserves to be reinvigorated in today’s political thought as much as it did in Lincoln’s time, Brookhiser contends.

Brookhiser will make this case at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 15, in Duane Physics G1B20 on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. His talk is titled: “Founders’ Son: How the Founding Fathers Inspired Abraham Lincoln.”

He appears at the invitation of Steven Hayward, the inaugural Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado Boulder.

(See his recent Wall Street Journal feature, “What Would Lincoln Do?” for a preview.)

Brookhiser is the author most recently of Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, and of eight books on revolutionary America: Founding Father, Rediscovering George Washington; Rules of Civility—the 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace; Alexander Hamilton, American; America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses 1735-1918; Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution; What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers;George Washington on Leadership, and James Madison.

He is author and host of two films by Michael Pack: Rediscovering George Washington (PBS, 2002) and Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton (PBS, 2011). He was the historian curator of “Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America,” a 2004 exhibition at the New York Historical Society. In 2008 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review.