Annual Rothbaum Lecture returns to commemorate the Constitution at ECU

ADA, Okla. – East Central University’s annual Rothbaum Lecture returns to campus Thursday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in the Estep Multimedia Center located inside the Bill S. Cole University Center.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

The Rothbaum Lecture, traditionally delivered on Constitution Day, marks the same date in 1789 when the final draft of the U.S. Constitution was signed by members of the Constitutional Convention.

Dr. Andrew Lang will deliver the lecture this year, titled, " Abraham Lincoln's Constitutionalism as a Lesson in Gratitude."

Lang received his Ph. D. in History from Rice University and both his M.A. and B.A. from the University of North Texas. He currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University.

He is the author of “A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era (2021)” and “In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (2017)”, which was awarded the Tom Watson Brown Book Award in 2018, which recognizes “the best book published on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War."

The Rothbaum Lecture is funded by an endowment established by the late Julian Rothbaum with a $25,000 gift to the ECU Foundation that was matched by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Rothbaum also established an endowment to fund the George Nigh Award for ECU’s top graduating senior.

A native of Tulsa, Rothbaum was a longtime leader in Oklahoma civic affairs, a 1986 inductee into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame and a member of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education and the University of Oklahoma Regents.

For more information on the lecture or the ECU Department of History, contact Dr. Christopher Bean at cbean@ecok.edu or 580-559-5418.

Cutline: Dr. Andrew Lang, photo courtesy of Mississippi State University.

-ECU-