Award-winning author James Oakes will discuss the Emancipation Proclamation in commemoration of the proclamation’s 150th anniversary.

Oakes’s lecture entitled, “The Emancipation Proclamation: Myths and Realities” will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Room 205 of Smith Hall Thursday.

“The Summersell Center has hosted an event each spring for the last three years in commemoration of a different aspect of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War,” said Joshua Rothman, a professor and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South. “Thinking about slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation in particular, was an obvious theme for this year.”

He said Oakes is among the most prominent scholars working in the field today.

“The Summersell Center and the University are really privileged to be able to have him in Tuscaloosa,” Rothman said.

Oakes, a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, was the 2013 recipient of the Lincoln Prize award for his book titled, “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865.” The book examined how exactly slavery disintegrated during the war and especially how slavery played into the considerations of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party.

“I think the whole question of the emancipation is a whole lot more complicated than people think,” George Rable, a professor and Charles G. Summersell Chair in Southern History, said. “Lincoln is a more complicated figure than people think.”

Oakes said he hopes the attendees will contemplate their views on the Emancipation Proclamation and the meaning of slavery.

“I’m hoping the event will give those who attend an opportunity not only to rethink their understandings of the Emancipation Proclamation by hearing one of America’s finest historians offer his thoughts, but also to reflect more broadly on the meaning of slavery and its end in the United States, which cast a long shadow,” Oakes said.

The event is free and open to the public.