A new History Channel documentary on Lincoln features an interview with Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. The program "Lincoln" premieres at 7 p.m., Monday, January 16, on the History Channel, on channel 52 on the Insight cable system in Galesburg and Peoria. It will be rebroadcast on Saturday, January 21 at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. CST.

The program features interviews with Wilson and other leading Lincoln scholars and historians, including Gore Vidal, Harold Holzer and Jay Winik.

The program "focuses primarily... on the hidden demons which Lincoln bore... and how they affected him," wrote one reviewer on the web site Civil War Interactive. The reviewer, Joe Avalon, also calls Wilson "the hidden star" of the program.

Both Avalon and Laurie Chambliss, another reviewer for Civil War Interactive, compare Wilson to Shelby Foote, a novelist and historian who gained fame as the narrator of the 1990 PBS production, "The Civil War."

Wilson is the author of a book about Lincoln's pre-presidential years, "Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln," which has won both the Barondess/Lincoln Award from the Civil War Roundtable and the Abraham Lincoln Institute's Book Prize. Wilson taught English at Knox from 1961 to 1997. He also has been Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies.

Wilson and his colleague at the Lincoln Studies Center, Rodney Davis, are currently working on a series of books about Lincoln for the University of Illinois Press. The series includes a new edition of William Herndon's 19th-century biography of Lincoln and a new edition of the texts of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 46 states and 43 nations. Knox's "Old Main" is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College

External Links:
The History Channel: "Lincoln"

Douglas Wilson