United States Capitol Historical Society Announces Its 2009 African American History Month Program

Lecture and Booksigning with Philip Dray, author of Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen

At noon on Wednesday, February 18, 2009, the United States Capitol Historical Society will host a lecture and booksigning in Ketchum Hall of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Building, 200 Maryland Avenue, N.E., to celebrate African American History Month.  Philip Dray, author of Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen, will discuss this important new book.

Yale University Professor David Blight has written: “Philip Dray’s Capitol Men tells a deeply important story most Americans still do not know—how the social and political revolution of emancipation in the Civil War brought several African Americans into the U.S. Congress during Reconstruction.  Some born free, some former slaves, these men, their careers, and their political acumen demonstrate both the promise and the betrayal of that era.  As we contemplate the role of race in our political history anew, there is no better place to start than this impressively researched and gracefully written work.”

Philip Dray is the author of several books, including Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America and At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, or you may order the book here http://www.uschscatalog.org/Prod-31-1-620/Capitol-Men.htm.

 To register for the event, rsvp to uschs@uschs.org or call 202-543-8919 x38.