The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) is pleased to announce that the Annual Undergraduate Conference in the American Polity will take place at Princeton University, April 3-4.  AHI is cosponsoring the event with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization at Colgate University.  Dr. Allen Guelzo will keynote the event.

The annual conference features outstanding undergraduates from institutions across the U.S. and research from a variety of disciplines including history, economics, philosophy, anthropology, religion, political science, and sociology.  Submissions should concern in some way the principles and practice of American political life.  Those interested can register and obtain additional information here, or they can contact AHI President Robert Paquette at bob@theahi.org.

The conference has two categories of undergraduate participants.   Those who will present research on one of three panels, each of which has a professorial commentator.  Others will participate from the audience and at the end of the conference in a formal discussion of a prescribed reading.

Dr. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, is an acclaimed scholar of the history of the Civil War. His publications include Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Wm.Eerdmans, 1999), which won both the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2000; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster, 2004) which also won the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize, for 2005; Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (Simon & Schuster, 2008), on the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; a volume of essays, Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009); and Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (in the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introductions’ series). In 2012, he published Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction with Oxford University Press, and in 2013 Alfred Knopf published his book on the battle of Gettysburg (for the 150thanniversary of the battle), Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion won the Lincoln Prize for 2014, the inaugural Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Round Table, and the Richard Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table. His most recent publications are Redeeming the Great Emancipator (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Reconstruction: A Concise History (Oxford University Press, 2018).