Nicholas Buccola, associate professor of political science at Linfield College, will present the opening lecture for the “Changing America” exhibit at Linfield.
Buccola will present “Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand: Frederick Douglass on Emancipation” on Thursday, March 3, at 7:30 p.m. in the Austin Reading Room of the Jereld R. Nicholson Library at Linfield. The talk is part of a traveling exhibition, “Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and the March on Washington, 1963,” which will run through March 25 in the library.
Buccola will examine Frederick Douglass’s views of emancipation by comparing his ideas with several of his contemporaries including Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Stephen A. Douglas. His focus in these comparisons will be on questions related to emancipation. What is emancipation? What are the legitimate means that may be used in pursuit of emancipation?
Buccola, chair of the Linfield political science department, has been a member of the Linfield faculty since 2007. He is the founding director of the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice at Linfield College. He is the recipient of the Allen and Pat Kelley Faculty Scholar Award and he is the two-time recipient of the Samuel Graf Faculty Achievement Award, he has received a National Endowment of the Humanities Enduring Questions grant.
Buccola’s teaching and research interests are in political theory and public law. His first book, “The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass,” was published by New York University Press and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He has published scholarly articles, book chapters and op-eds on many topics including same-sex marriage, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Adams, the abolitionist movement, Leo Strauss, Judith Shklar and liberal education. In March, he has two books being published. Hackett Publishing Company just released “The Essential Douglass,” a collection of Frederick Douglass’s writings and speeches edited by Buccola. Later this month, the University Press of Kansas will publish “Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy,” a collection of essays about the political thought of the 16th president. Buccola is currently writing a book on the debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union in 1965.
The traveling exhibition is presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of American History in collaboration with the American Library Association Public Programs Office. The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The lecture and exhibit are free and open to the public. They are sponsored by the Linfield Department of Political Science, The Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights, and Justice, the Elliot Alexander Fund for Political Science, the Dean’s Speaker Fund and the Linfield Nicholson Library. For more information, contact Susan Barnes Whyte, college librarian, at swhyte@linfield.edu or 503-883-2517.
