A new Great Texts course will be taught by Professor Chris Flannery in summer 2012. Inspired in part by Sara Whitis' successful thesis, Flannery proposes to teach Harry V. Jaffa's major works on Abraham Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War. While advising Sara as she grappled with Jaffa's complexly layered analysis of Lincoln's statesmanship, Flannery said he "came to think there was a good course there."

"Big chunks of these books are extended analyses of great American texts. Crisis is a study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it not only examines in great detail Lincoln's arguments and Stephen Douglas's arguments in those debates; it also offers, for example, an extensive analysis of Lincoln's Lyceum speech and Temperance Address, including outlines of both speeches," Flannery noted. Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom is an extended commentary on the Gettysburg Address and as part of that commentary the book offers careful analysis of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and his July 4, 1861 address to Congress in Special Session; it also analyses Jefferson's "Summary View of the Rights of British Americans" and James Madison's essay on sovereignty among other great American texts, Flannery continued. "I saw that we might use Jaffa to help us become better readers of important American works."

Beyond that, Flannery argues that Jaffa's work represents a milestone in the political historical study of America. Jaffa challenged the established orthodoxy of twentieth-century scholarship in his effort to understand the Founders and their great heir, Lincoln, "as they understood themselves." To do this, he had to overcome "tremendous barriers" modern historians placed between students of America and the country they were trying to understand.

To illustrate this point, Flannery cites the inf luential American historian Carl Becker, whose book The Declaration of Independence (1922; 1942) "Jaffa still says is the best book ever written" on the Declaration. Even so, Jaffa profoundly disagrees with the book's central assumption, which is indicated in Becker's statement, "To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question." Such a view, which Jaffa holds to be characteristic of the contemporary history and political science disciplines, would astonish Jefferson and Lincoln, who regarded the statement "All men are created equal" as a "selfevident" truth.

Jaffa, in contrast, seriously poses the question Becker called meaningless, examining the truth of the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration. Only by interrogating this idea, Jaffa maintains, can one take the measure of Jefferson's and Lincoln's statesmanship.

Even though it repudiates the current scholarly attitude toward statements about natural rights, Jaffa's work has won the admiration of other American historians. One noted authority on Lincoln and the Civil War, Mark E. Needly, Jr., went so far as to say in the journal Civil War History that "Crisis of the House Divided has shaped the thought of a generation of Abraham Lincoln and Civil War scholars." Professor Flannery's praise is higher. "Jaffa's scholarly work presents as great an American text in the academic realm as Jefferson's Declaration or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address offer in the political realm," he says.