Noted historian Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln, will present the annual J. Roderick Davis Lecture at Samford Thursday, Oct. 22, at 7:30 p.m. in Wright Center Concert Hall.

The program is a salute to this year’s 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in 1809. The public is invited free.

Dr. Burton is a prolific scholar, having written or edited 15 books and more than 100 articles. The Age of Lincoln, his most recent work, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction, and was selected as book of the month by the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club and the Military Book Club.

The book is not a typical history of the Civil War, but rather a sweeping look at America from the 1840s through the war, Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution, with Lincoln as a central figure, according to Samford historian John Mayfield in a review in Seasons, the Samford magazine.

Burton is the Burroughs Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. He was previously professor of history, African American studies and sociology at the University of Illinois. He was selected as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Cosponsored with support from the Alabama Humanities Foundation, the lecture will be preceded at 4 p.m. by a Lincoln discussion by scholars Lawrence Kohl, University of Alabama; Harriet Amos Doss, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and William Ross, Samford’s Cumberland School of Law. The panel discussion will be held in Brock Forum of Dwight Beeson Hall at Samford