Dr. Jacob K. Friefeld (Director)
Dr. Friefeld comes to UIS from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, where he served as the Illinois and Midwest studies research historian. He has made significant academic contributions through books, articles and professional conference presentations. Notably, his co-authored book “Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History” received critical acclaim and was recognized with the 2018 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction-History, as well as being selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the Association of College and Research Libraries. He has a new book, “The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration,” that is scheduled to be released in August 2023.
Apart from his research contributions, Friefeld has been actively involved in public history initiatives. He has led numerous exhibits and historical marker projects that highlight the contributions of African American homesteaders and other significant events in history. Moreover, Friefeld has conducted several lectures, workshops, and public programs to promote historical awareness and appreciation among diverse audiences.
Friefeld earned a doctorate in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies. He was also the project manager for the UNL History Harvest, a community-centered digital public history project. Prior to this, he earned a master’s degree in history from Loyola University Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Dr. Michael Burlingame
Michael Burlingame, holder of the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at University of Illinois Springfield, is the author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln and the Civil War, as well as the editor of many collections of Lincoln primary source materials. A graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Connecticut College in New London for many years before joining the faculty at University of Illinois Springfield in 2009. That year, The Atlantic rated Abraham Lincoln: A Life one of the five best books of the year, and in the New York Review of Books, the dean of Civil War historians, James McPherson, wrote that Burlingame “knows more about Lincoln than any other living person.”
Dr. Graham A. Peck
Prof. Peck specializes in antebellum American political history, and particularly in Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and the origins of the Civil War, but he is also very interested in the intersection of scholarship and other forms of history. For this reason he wrote, directed, and produced a feature-length film on Douglas for use at the Douglas Tomb State Historic Site in Chicago. The film features performances by leading Douglas and Lincoln reenactors, interviews with five historians of the Civil War, and hundreds of nineteenth-century images. More recently, Prof. Peck co-directed Lincoln & Douglas: Touring Illinois in Turbulent Times, a 47-minute documentary road film about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which he made with art professor Nathan Peck during the tumultuous Covid summer of 2020. The film features five Lincoln or Douglas reenactors and several interviews, including one with a BLM activist in Springfield who successfully urged removal of Douglas’ statue from the grounds of the Illinois State Capitol.
