Abraham Lincoln
Frank Keating takes you on an ultimate tour of Abraham Lincoln's life from boyhood to presidency in this biography, which includes stunning paintings by award-winning artist Mike Wimmer that bring the sixteenth President of the United States to vivid life. To say Abraham Lincoln came from humble beginnings is an understatement. He was born in a Kentucky log cabin with a packed-dirt floor, rough slab roof, and leather-hinged door. He went barefoot for most of the year and wasn't expected to amount to much. But reading was everything to him and his free time was consumed by books. Abraham Lincoln read furiously, studied law, and knew that hard work was his only path to making a change in the world. When he ran for the presidency, he stood for unity--one people and one land. He brought freedom to all citizens, ended slavery, and made the country whole again. This visual tour de force is based on historical documents and chronicles Honest Abe's life from boyhood to his extraordinary leadership position as the sixteenth President of the United States of America. Author: Frank Keating. Paintings: Mike Wimmer. Publisher: Simon & Schuster. Hardcover, 31 pages. Measures 9" x 11.25". Weighs 15.1 oz.
The Emancipation Proclamation is the most important document of arguably the greatest president in U.S. history. Now, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, and Harold Holzer -- eminent experts in their fields -- remember, analyze, and interpret the Emancipation Proclamation in three distinct respects: the influence of and impact upon African Americans; the legal, political, and military exigencies; and the role pictorial images played in establishing the document in public memory. The result is a carefully balanced yet provocative study that views the proclamation and its author from the perspective of fellow Republicans, antiwar Democrats, the press, the military, the enslaved, free blacks, and the antislavery white establishment, as well as the artists, publishers, sculptors, and their patrons who sought to enshrine Abraham Lincoln and his decree of freedom in iconography. Author: Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, & Frank J. WIlliams. Publisher: Louisiana State University Press. Hardcover, 162 pages. Measures 7.25" x 10.25". Weighs 1 lb. 4.5 oz.
In this succinct study, Edna Greene Medford examines the ideas and events that shaped President Lincoln's responses to slavery, following the arc of his ideological development from the beginning of the Civil War, when he aimed to pursue a course of noninterference, to his championing of slavery's destruction before the conflict ended. Throughout, Medford juxtaposes the president's motivations for advocating freedom with the aspirations of African Americans themselves, restoring African Americans to the center of the story about the struggle for their own liberation. Author: Edna Greene Medford. Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press. Hardcover, 141 pages. Measures 5.25" x 8.25". Weighs 10.6 oz.
From the acclaimed historian and bestselling author: a page-turning account of the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln--two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation's gravest sin. John Brown was a charismatic and deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to destroy slavery by any means. When Congress opened Kansas territory to slavery in 1854, Brown raised a band of followers to wage war. His men tore pro-slavery settlers from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. Three years later, Brown and his men assaulted the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm slaves with weapons for a race war that would cleanse the nation of slavery.Brown's violence pointed ambitious Illinois lawyer and former officeholder Abraham Lincoln toward a different solution to slavery: politics. Lincoln spoke cautiously and dreamed big, plotting his path back to Washington and perhaps to the White House. Yet his caution could not protect him from the vortex of violence Brown had set in motion. After Brown's arrest, his righteous dignity on the way to the gallows led many in the North to see him as a martyr to liberty. Southerners responded with anger and horror to a terrorist being made into a saint. Lincoln shrewdly threaded the needle between the opposing voices of the fractured nation and won election as president. But the time for moderation had passed, and Lincoln's fervent belief that democracy could resolve its moral crises peacefully faced its ultimate test. The Zealot and the Emancipator is the thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom. Author: H. W. Brands. Publisher: Anchor Books. Paperback, 445 pages. Measures 6" x 9.25". Weighs 1 lb. 5.8 oz.