Harold Holzer - Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration

Hunter College President Ann Kirschner hosts a Book Party for Harold Holzer, Jonathan F. Fanton Director, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in conversation with actor and author Stephen Lang.
From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and-perhaps most significantly-voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.
Harold Holzer has served since 2015 as Jonathan Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. Earlier, he was senior Vice President (and, later, a Trustee) of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a press secretary to Rep. Bella Abzug (Hunter ’42) and Mario Cuomo. The author of more than 50 books on Lincoln and the Civil War, Holzer was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2008 and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2015. President Clinton named him Co-chair of the U.S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission in 2000. Holzer has co-authored and appeared on stage in a number of public readings -including several programs on Lincoln and World War I at Roosevelt House with Stephen Lang. His new book Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration was hailed by Doris Kearns Goodwin as “deeply researched and beautifully written.”
Stephen Lang is an actor, author, and playwright who has starred in several films inspired by American history: most notably as Gen. George Pickett in Gettysburg, “Stonewall” Jackson in Gods and Generals, Ike Clanton in Tombstone, and the title role in the TV movie Babe Ruth. Lang has appeared on stage in The Speed of Darkness (Tony nomination), Hamlet, A Few Good Men, and Death of a Salesman, and on screen as Col. Quaritch in the global phenomenon Avatar and its recent and future sequels. Lang also authored and performed in the one-man play Beyond Glory, in which he portrayed Medal of Honor recipients including Senator Daniel Inouye, Admiral James Stockdale, and Battle of Gettysburg hero James Jackson Purman. Lang has performed as Purman at The Lincoln Forum, the Civil War Institute, and the Gettysburg Trust, from all of which he has received lifetime achievement awards. Lang is the author of the young readers’ book The Wheatfield about Purman’s heroism at Gettysburg. He and Harold Holzer have appeared together at The Metropolitan Museum, Symphony Space, Cooper Union, and Gettysburg, among other venues.