Thursday, Sept. 19. Head down the rabbit hole into the wild history of political campaigning across the decades with games, drinks and fun activities.
Jon Grinspan, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, is the special guest at Campaign Madness. This GHM After Hours event also features fun, games and adult beverages for sale as guests go down the rabbit hole to explore the wild history of political campaigning across the decades.
Grinspan will be discussing his new book Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War. The book is a propulsive account of American history’s most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war. Publishers Weekly calls Wide Awake “an insightful and moving analysis of how America descended into civil war.”
Doors open at 5:30 pm with a cash bar, democracy games, and a scavenger hunt in the museum exhibitions. The conversation with Jon Grinspan starts at 6:30 pm with book signing to follow. Copies will be available for purchase from Scuppernong Books.
Free and open to the public.
Jon Grinspan is Curator of Political History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He is the author of the award-winning The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the 19th Century. He frequently contributes to the New York Times, and has been featured in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, D.C.
MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes–mostly working-class Americans in their twenties–became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there.
In this gripping narrative, Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. Perfect for readers of Lincoln on the Verge and TheField of Blood, Wide Awake bears witness to the power of protest, the fight for majority rule, and the defense of free speech. At its core, Wide Awake illuminates a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.
