You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is a book of rare distinction. Curiously, this classic biography of America's most tragic First Lady by one of America's most distinguished biographers and poets has long been out-of-print. Both the author and the subject deserve greater historical attention, and what emerges from the book is a haunting portrait of an enigmatic life, written with a style and sensitivity that is both sympathetic and unflinching.
The book that inspired the popular Concise Lincoln Library series In April 1831, on a flatboat grounded on the Rutledge milldam below the town of New Salem, Abraham Lincoln worked to pry the boat loose, directed the crew, and ran into the village to borrow an auger to bore a hole in the end hanging over the dam, causing the water to drain and the boat to float free. Seventeen years later, while traveling home from a round of political speeches, Lincoln witnessed another similar occurrence. For the rest of his journey, he considered how to construct a device to free stranded boats from shallow waters. In this first thorough examination of Abraham Lincoln’s mechanical mind, Jason Emerson bri...
"Abraham Lincoln has long been considered the greatest president by scholars of American history. According to legal scholars, he could just as easily have been one of the foremost lawyers in the nation had he not become president." "Lincoln practiced law for about twenty-five years, mainly in the circuit courts of Illinois. However, he was hardly a hick country lawyer. In contrast, Lincoln was an incisive, determined, and assertive litigator with an overwhelming caseload. He sought out new business for his law firm and cared about earning a comfortable living." "A ten-year research project, the Lincoln Legal Papers, discovered thousands of yellowed legal documents in musty and dusty courtro...
A collection of original essays by ten eminent historians that explore religion, education, middle-class family life, the antislavery movement, politics, and law in "Lincoln's America."
Lincoln's letters have been cited in countless biographical and critical works yet have received little scholarly attention as a whole. This comprehensive study reveals his letters to be fundamental to understanding his development as a writer. Early on, he employed Hugh Blair's popular idea of developing "taste" in written documents, and carefully studied the letters of his contemporaries. He wrote more than 5000 of his own. As he became more proficient, he employed more sophisticated rhetorical strategies to deal with political opponents, imperious generals and critics of his policies.
President Abraham Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, the Savior of the Union, and an American martyr to the people who read about him. But that was not how his sons knew him. Presidential historian Alan Manning invites readers to see not the thoughtful, burdened president delivering the Gettysburg Address to a war-torn nation, but a man quietly reading bedtime stories to his sleepy-eyed sons; and not the resolute commander-in-chief seeking out winning generals and forming war policy, but a man wrestling with his own grown son’s desire to join the army and go off to war. A combination of history, biography, and family culture, this book follows Lincoln from his growing law practice in Springfield through the turbulent war years in the White House, highlighting the same challenges that many fathers face today: balancing a successful career with paternal responsibilities—a perspective largely ignored by previous Lincoln biographers, thus helping to complete the portrait of one of the most popular, significant, and complex figures in American history.
Just as an archeologist can reassemble pot shards and draw inferences about the civilization that produced it, I've examined a mass of verbal chunks left by Lincoln and people around him. I've sorted jumbled piles of fragments, restored them, and pieced them together in a way that reveals the speakers' world. --Richard Lawrence Miller, from the preface Quoting from eyewitness accounts, Richard Lawrence Miller allows Lincoln and his contemporaries to tell the story of this monumental American and bring a fascinating era of American history to life. The book covers Lincoln's birth through his first election to the Illinois legislature in 1834. Subsequent volumes will deal with Lincoln's life up to the White House years.
More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than perhaps any other figure in Western civilization, save Jesus of Nazareth, and with so much material available on Lincoln, it can be difficult to sift through all the biographies and recollections to get at the essence of one of the great Americans of all time. In this book—both history and biography, informative as well as entertaining, meant to be read in whole or in bite-sized chunks—historian Thomas Flagel distills the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln in twenty-five annotated lists. Flagel’s lists present a cross-section of Lincoln’s life, career, and presidency: —Homes and jobs —Mentors, friends, and allies —Books an...
A reassessment of the life of Abraham Lincoln argues that America's sixteenth president suffered from depression and explains how Lincoln used the coping strategies he had developed to face the crises of the Civil War and personal tragedy.