Louis Masur, American Cultural Historian, Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books including Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction & The Crisis of Reunion (2015) and Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (2012), which won the Lincoln Institute Book Prize.

Masur’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Salon and other publications. He has been elected to membership of the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society of American Historians, and has received teaching awards from Harvard University, the City College of New York, Trinity College, and Rutgers University.

In his position at Rutgers as Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History, his focus is nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States cultural history. Professor Masur is an American cultural historian who focuses on discrete moments and seeks to unpack their meaning, whether the events of a year or a single photograph or a seminal record album. His most recent book is a study of Lincoln’s last speech and the problem of wartime Reconstruction. An alumnus of the University of Buffalo and Princeton University, Masur writes and lectures about a range of topics including Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, popular culture and visual history.