Speaker At Ithaca College To Commemorate Lincoln's 'House Divided' Speech

Dave Maley, 3/14/2008

ITHACA, NY—In 1858, Abraham Lincoln declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” as he launched his ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate against Stephen A. Douglas. While the speech has since become one of Lincoln’s most famous, it is often misunderstood as a prediction of the coming Civil War.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of that address, Ithaca College will host a talk by Distinguished Speaker in the Humanities David Zarefsky, a nationally recognized authority on rhetoric and forensics. Zarefsky’s presentation—“Abraham Lincoln and the House Divided: A Study in Public Argument and Politics”—will be held on Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m. in Textor 101. It is free and open to the public.

The Owen L. Coon Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, Zarefsky teaches courses on the history and criticism of U.S. public discourse, with a special focus on the pre–Civil War period and on the 1960s. In his talk, he will analyze Lincoln’s speech as a creative response to the complicated and volatile political situation regarding slavery, with a view to understanding the relationships between text and context and between language and political choice.

Zarefsky is the author of the books “Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate” and “President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Rhetoric and History,” both of which received the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association (NCA). A past president of the NCA, Zarefsky was honored with its Distinguished Scholar Award in 1994 and Distinguished Service Award in 2001.