On Standing
Tue, 10 Mar
|Bronco Student Center
Civil War and the Social Contract
Time & Location
10 Mar 2026, 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm
Bronco Student Center, 3801 W Temple Ave, Pomona, CA 91768, USA
About the event
Why does the defeat of the South breed resentment in more Americans than the victory of the Union and the Emancipation Proclamation generate hope for American democracy in them? Where does the yearning for the Confederacy—its generals, military bases, and flags—stem from? And what does its compulsive return today illuminate about the American social contract? About global apartheids and neocolonial fantasies of civil war at large?
Join us for the Spring 2026 American Institutions Common Core Lecture and Colloquium for a peek into the past and future of Civil War and its place in the modern democratic experiment.
On Standing: The Life of a Constitutional Concept
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,” Lincoln wrote to Congress in December 1862, exactly a month before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. “Honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”