Contact: Allison Matthews
STARKVILLE, Miss.-- The John F. and Jeanne A. Marszalek Library Fund and Lecture Series will continue at Mississippi State University Wednesday [March 21] at 2 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library's John Grisham Room.
Featured lecturers for this installment of the series are Thomas A. Horrocks, associate librarian for collections at Harvard University's Houghton Library, and Kevin B. Johnson, 2012 Marszalek Graduate Student Award recipient. Horrocks' presentation is titled "Promoting Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter: Lincoln's Campaign Biographies and the Shaping of an Image."
A doctoral graduate in history of the University of Pennsylvania, Horrocks previously has served as acting co-director of Harvard's Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine and associate library director in the Center for the History of Medicine. He also has served as director of historical programs and services at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, Penn.
He spent a year as an editorial assistant for the Correspondence of Charles Darwin at the American Philosophical Society Library, and he has recently published a new biography of President James Buchanan and co-edited the proceedings of a Lincoln Bicentennial Conference at Harvard. Horrocks has published widely in a variety of professional journals and popular magazines and lectured to many professional organizations. He is presently completing a book, to be published in 2014, titled "Lincoln's Biographies: A Study in Image Making."
The John F. and Jeanne A. Marszalek Library Fund and Lecture Series was established in 2002 by the Marszaleks and by MSU Libraries to encourage use of primary source materials related to American history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jacksonian America, and race relations. The series includes papers presented by university students and a lecture by an established historian of national reputation. The Marszalek Library Fund is a special fund used annually to purchase primary source materials to be added to the holdings of Mitchell Memorial Library.
For more information on MSU Libraries, the Marszalek Lecture Series, and the upcoming lecture, please visit http://library.msstate.edu/Marszalek.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see www.msstate.edu.