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The definitive life of Abraham Lincoln, With Malice Toward None is historian Stephen B. Oates's acclaimed and enthralling portrait of America's greatest leader. Oates masterfully charts, with the pacing of a novel, Lincoln's rise from bitter poverty in America's midwestern frontier to become a self-made success in business, law, and regional politics. The second half of the book examines his legendary leadership on the national stage as president during one of the country's most tumultuous and bloody periods, the Civil War years, which concluded tragically with Lincoln's assassination. In this award-winning biography, Lincoln steps forward out of the shadow of myth as a recognizable, fully drawn American whose remarkable life continues to inspire and inform us today.
In this collection of ten interrelated essays, Stephen B. Oates focuses on the American Civil War era and several of its leading figures. While arguing 'the need for unflinching realism and a humanistic approach in the study of the past, ' Oates critically examines alternative interpretive practices, particularly those serving polemical, political, or mythical standards.
This masterful and moving biography follows Lincoln's bitter struggle with poverty, his self-made success in business and law, his early disappointing political career, and his leadership as President during one of America's most turbulent periods. 48 halftone illustrations.
“The most comprehensive, the most thoroughly researched and documented, the most scholarly of the biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr.” —Henry Steele Commanger, Philadelphia Inquirer Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award * A New York Times Notable Book of the Year By the acclaimed biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Nat Turner, and John Brown, Stephen B. Oates's prizewinning Let the Trumpet Sound is the definitive one-volume life of Martin Luther King, Jr. This brilliant examination of the great civil rights icon and the movement he led provides a lasting portrait of a man whose dream shaped American history. “Drawing on interviews with those who knew King, previously unutilized material at Presidential libraries, and the holdings of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, Mr. Oates has written the most comprehensive account of King’s life yet published. . . . He displays a remarkable understanding of King’s individual role in the civil rights movement. . . . Oates’s biography helps us appreciate how sorely King is missed.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review
A stunning biography of Clara Barton—a woman who determined to serve her country during the Civil War—from acclaimed author Stephen B. Oates. When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became a veritable soldier, a nurse, and a one-woman relief agency operating in the heart of the conflict. Now, award-winning author Stephen B. Oates, drawing on archival materials not used by her previous biographers, has written the first complete account of Clara Barton’s active engagement in the Civil War. By the summer of 1862, with no in...
“A penetrating reconstruction of the most disturbing and crucial slave uprising in America’s history”—with the full text of The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York Times). In August of 1831, the enslaved carpenter and preacher Nat Turner led an anti-slavery uprising in Virginia. It lasted several days before state militias captured Turner and put him on trial. Before he was executed, Turner recounted the unbearable conditions he endured and how he secretly built support for his cause over many years. Turner’s Rebellion, and the savage reprisals that followed, shattered longstanding myths of the contented slave and the benign master. Turner’s story and tactics also inspired the ab...
Another Confederate cavalry raid impends. You hear the snort of an impatient horse, the leathery squeaking of saddles, the low-voiced commands of officers, the muffled cluck of guns cocked in preparation—then the sudden rush of motion, the din of another attack. This classic story seeks to illuminate a little-known theater of the Civil War—the cavalry battles of the Trans-Mississippi West, a region that included Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, the Indian Territory, and part of Louisiana. Stephen B. Oates traces the successes and defeats of the cavalry; its brief reinvigoration under John S. "Rip" Ford, who fought and won the last battle of the war at Palmetto Ranch; and finally, the disintegration of this once-proud fighting force.
This unique approach shows the crucial role that perception of events played in the sectional hostilities that bore the United States irreversibly toward a national smashup.
The Definitive Biography of John Brown “John Brown’s life was filled with drama, and Oates tells his story in a manner so engrossing that the book reads like a novel, despite the fact that it is extensively documented and researched.” —Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review Professor Oates “has given us the most objective and absorbing biography of John Brown ever written. The subtitle perfectly captures Brown’s own conception of his role in the antislavery crusade. Oates describes with subtlety and detail John Brown’s early career, his struggles with poverty, illness and death, the desperate straits the man was put to in support of his large family of twenty children. He t...
A biographical study of the 16th U.S. president, and an essential book for any student of Lincoln and American history. In this multifaceted portrait, Oates, “the most popular historical interpreter of Lincoln” (Gabor S. Boritt, New York Times Book Review), exposes the human side of the great and tragic president—including his depression, his difficulties with love, and his troubled and troubling attitudes about slavery—while also confronting the many legends that have arisen around “Honest Abe.” Oates throughout raises timely questions about what the Lincoln mythos reveals about the American people. Praise for Abraham Lincoln “There is no better introduction to current thinkin...