Daniel Walker Howe

Dan Howe grew up in Denver and now lives in Los Angeles. He learned to love history when he was about 6 years old; his father put him on his lap and told him about Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to fight the Romans. He has taught at Yale, UCLA, and Oxford. He won the Pulitzer Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007). He is also author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (1997), and he intends his next book to be about the U.S.-Mexican War.

Lecture topics:

• "What Hath God Wrought": The Communications Revolution and its Consequences, 1815-1848 (illustrated)
• The Improvement of America and the Improvement of Americans, 1815-1848 (illustrated)
• "Honest Abe": Abraham Lincoln and the Moral Character
• Abraham Lincoln as a Self-Made Man
• Manifest Destiny and the War with Mexico (illustrated)

Viewed Saturday, November 21, 2009