Person Place Thing: Randy Cohen featuring Harold Holzer - SOLD OUT

Person Place Thing is an interview show based on the idea that people are especially engaging when they speak, not directly about themselves, but something they care about. Guests discuss one person, one place, and one thing with particular meaning to them.

For this event, the person, place, and thing will each be Abraham Lincoln-related. Please join us for a lively conversation about history, storytelling, and the people and places that have shaped Harold Holzer’s career as a historian.

Featuring musical guest Hubby Jenkins, a banjoist and singer.

Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for “Late Night with David Letterman” for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s “TV Nation.” He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine. He is currently the creator and host of Person Place Thing, a public radio program.

Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House, a post he assumed in 2015 after 23 years as Senior Vice President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For ten years (2000-2010), Holzer also served as co-chairman of the U. S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. In 2008, Holzer was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. Holzer spent his early career as a journalist; as spokesman for New York’s PBS station, WNET; as Congressional press secretary for Rep. Bella S. Abzug; and as an aide to New York Governor Mario Cuomo (with whom he wrote two Lincoln books). A prolific historian, Holzer is the author, co-author, or editor of 54 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. His Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion won the 2015 Lincoln Prize, as well as awards from Harvard and Columbia. His most recent book is Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. In 2025 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.