Fulbright scholar named Rinella Memorial Lincoln Lecturer, will speak Oct. 29 at QU

QUINCY — Prolific author and Lincoln historian Brian R. Dirck, who recently returned from Japan where he was a Fulbright lecturer, will deliver the second Samuel C. Rinella Jr. Memorial Lincoln Lecture at the McHugh Theatre on the campus of Quincy University at 7 p.m. Oct. 29.

A professor of history at Anderson University in Indiana, Dirck will address the subject of his most recent book, “The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death.” The event will begin with a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the lobby of the theater and will be followed by questions and answers. The event will be free of charge and open to the public. Per the university’s policy on COVID, those attending will be required to wear masks.

Dirck’s recent book examines Lincoln’s response to the presence of death, which shadowed him throughout his life. Quincy’s Orville Browning, a U.S. senator, and his wife Eliza were directly involved in some of the Lincoln tragedies. When typhoid fever struck President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie, Eliza nursed Willie at the White House. When the boy died on February 20, 1862, Sen. Browning supervised the five doctors who embalmed the boy’s body and arranged his funeral and burial. 

“There was little precedent for exactly how the deceased child of a sitting president was to be memorialized,” Dirck writes, “but people agreed that the affair was handled well.” 

Directors of the Lincoln-Douglas Interpretive Center in 2019 established the Rinella Lecture series to honor the late Samuel C. Rinella Jr. for his lifelong interest in Quincy history and the city’s many connections to Abraham Lincoln. The board sought particularly to recognize Rinella for his “valuable contributions promoting and teaching Quincy, Illinois, and United States history,” according to LDIC chairman Chuck Scholz. 

As a member of Quincy’s Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Rinella and his finance committee raised more than $500,000 for the city’s celebration. The effort led to the restoration of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate site in Washington Park and the establishment of the Lincoln-Douglas Debate Interpretive Center, 128 N. Fifth. Both are open to the public at no charge.

Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, who has written and edited more than 50 books about the 16^th president and a personal friend of Rinella, was the first Rinella lecturer in 2019. The COVID pandemic deferred the series last year.

The LDIC board schedules the annual Rinella lectures near Oct. 13 to observe the date in 1858 in Quincy when Lincoln and Douglas debated for the sixth time in their race for Douglas’s U.S. Senate seat. An estimated 12,000 people from Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri attended that debate. Area voters had elected Douglas their representative in Congress in 1843, the Illinois General Assembly elected him U.S. senator in 1847, and he kept his seat in 1858.

Dirck earned his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Central Arkansas, his master’s degree in history at Rice University and his doctorate in history at the University of Kansas. He was selected as a Fulbright scholar. He taught courses in U.S. history this year at the University of Tokyo and Kyoritsu Women’s University as a Fulbright lecturer.

Dirck has researched and written extensively about Lincoln and the era of the Civil War. His first book, “Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865,” analyzed the two Civil War presidents, the Union’s Lincoln and the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis. He won the Barondess best Lincoln book award in 2007 for “Lincoln the Lawyer,” a study of Lincoln’s legal career. His other Lincoln scholarship includes “Lincoln and the Constitution” and “Abraham Lincoln and White America.” The Illinois State Historical Society selected his recent “Lincoln and Indiana,” a study of Lincoln’s childhood years, for its annual Award of Achievement. Dirck edited the acclaimed “Lincoln Emancipated: The President and the Politics of Race.”

Dirck has written numerous articles and has lectured at Harvard University, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Lincoln Forum, the Lincoln Colloquium in Springfield and Gettysburg’s Civil War Institute.