The Lincoln Douglas Debates Revisted

DEBATE! UCLA and USC debate teams at the Hammer Museum

The USC and UCLA debate teams will engage in a public debate in the first of two evenings of programming around the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Team members will face off around the topic, "Should government be responsible for promoting social justice?"; a contemporizing of the theme of Lincoln-Douglas debates, all of which dealt with the issue and question of slavery.

Performance and Lecture revisiting Lincoln / Douglas

In the final weeks leading up to the 2009 presidential election, artist Sharon Hayes and historian Ronald C. White revisit the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat, in 1858 for an Illinois Senate seat. These debates presaged the issues that Lincoln faced in the 1860 presidential campaign.

Sharon Hayes works in performance, video, and installation through protests, speeches, and organized demonstrations in which crowds and individuals are invited to rethink their roles in the construction of public opinion. She is a graduate of UCLA's MFA program and is an assistant professor at the Cooper Union, New York.

Ronald C. White, Jr. is the author of Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. A graduate of UCLA, he is a Fellow at the Huntington Library, Visiting Professor of History at UCLA, and Professor Emeritus of American Religious History at San Francisco Theological Seminary. His upcoming work A. Lincoln: A Biography will be published in 2009, the year of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial.

The Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024
310.443.7000