September Noontime Programs Feature Suffragettes, Lincoln, and More
Press Release · Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Washington, DC

Special noontime programs at the National Archives in September include the third volume of Sidney Blumenthal’s biography The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln and screenings of Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema and Silent Feminists: America's First Women Directors in conjunction with the current exhibit Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote.

These programs are free and open to the public and will be held at noon in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC. Attendees should use the Special Events entrance on Constitution Avenue at 7th Street, NW. Metro accessible on the Yellow and Green lines, Archives/Navy Memorial/Penn Quarter station. Reservations are recommended and can be made online. For those without reservations, seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. The theater doors will open 45 minutes prior to the start of the program. Late seating will not be permitted 20 minutes after the program begins.

BOOK TALK & SIGNING: All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, Voll III, 1856–1863
Tuesday, September 10, Reserve a seat; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel
Volume III of Sidney Blumenthal’s biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, brings the prairie lawyer out of his wilderness into the presidency. Lincoln rises from defeat and obscurity to become the Commander-in-Chief who strikes down slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation. 

BOOK TALK & SIGNING: The Nature of Constitutional Rights: The Invention and Logic of Strict Judicial Scrutiny
Tuesday, September 17, Reserve a seat; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel 
The U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws, and various other rights without specifying the circumstances under which government may lawfully infringe them. In this theoretically sophisticated and engaging book, Professor Richard Fallon, Jr. explores how and why the strict scrutiny test emerged to fill that gap and, in the process, shaped American understandings of judicial review and constitutional rights themselves. 

DOCUMENTARY FILM SCREENING: Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema and Silent Feminists: America's First Women Directors*
Friday, September 20, Reserve a seat
In the days before movies could talk, silent films spoke clearly of sexual politics, and in Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema, historian and writer Kay Sloan has assembled rare and wonderful footage that opens a historic window onto how woman suffrage was represented in early American cinema.  (2003; 35 minutes.)  

Using film clips, rare photos, and interviews with survivors of the era, The Silent Feminists rediscovers the work of America’s pioneering women directors, whose achievements are often overlooked in favor of that of their male counterparts. Co-directed by Anthony Slide, whom Lillian Gish called “our preeminent historian of silent film,” this groundbreaking work pays fond tribute to the more than 30 women directors who contributed much to the art and craft of movie-making.  (2008; 45 minutes.)

BOOK TALK & SIGNING: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth 
Tuesday, September 24; Reserve a seat; watch the live stream on our YouTube Channel 
More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in Searching for Black Confederates, imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.

*Programs presented in conjunction with our exhibition: Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote. Rightfully Hers is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation through the generous support of Unilever, Pivotal Ventures, Carl M. Freeman Foundation in honor of Virginia Allen Freeman, AARP, AT&T, Ford Motor Company Fund, Facebook, Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, Google, HISTORY ®, and Jacqueline B. Mars. Additional support for National Outreach and Programs provided by Denise Gwyn Ferguson, BMO Financial Group, Hearst Foundations, Maris S. Cuneo Foundation, FedEx, Bernstein Family Foundation, and The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation/Ambassador Fay-Hartog Levin (Ret.).  Also presented in partnership with the 2020 Women's Vote Centennial Initiative, the National Council of Negro Women, and the League of Women Voters of the National Capital Area.