Please note: Optional Dinner will start at 6:00 PM. The Lecture will start at 7:00 PM. To make dinner reservations, email CvilleCWRT@gmail.com and indicate your entree choice: prime rib, salmon or chicken. Dinner includes salad and dessert. Cost is $24 for members and $30 for non-members.

LECTURE TOPIC:  At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there. Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. 

SPEAKER BIO: Jon Grinspan is the Curator of Political History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He is the author of numerous articles in national newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Atlantic and Smithsonian Magazine. This talk is based on his 2024 book of the same title. His prior books include The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865 - 1915 and The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century.