"From journalist and historian Steve Inskeep, a compelling and nuanced exploration of the political acumen of Abraham Lincoln via sixteen encounters before and during his presidency, bringing to light not only the strategy of a great politician who inherited a country divided, but lessons for our own disorderly present. In 1855, as the United States found itself at odds over the issue of slavery, then lawyer Abraham Lincoln composed a note on the...

Four score and seven years ago . . . Are any six words better known, of greater import, or from a more crucial moment in our nation's history? And yet after 150 years the dramatic and surprising story of how Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address has never been fully told. Until now. Martin Johnson's remarkable work of historical and literary detection illuminates a speech, a man, and a moment in history that we thought we knew. Johnson guides readers...

"The story of Abraham Lincoln's faith and intellectual life-updated and revised with a new preface-from the three-time winner of the Lincoln Prize and best-selling Civil War-era historian Allen Guelzo. llen Guelzo's peerless account of America's most celebrated president explores the role of ideas in Lincoln's life, treating him as a serious thinker deeply involved in the nineteenth-century debates over politics, religion, and culture. Through masterful...

An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln's antislavery strategies. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American...

Revered today across the political spectrum, Abraham Lincoln believed in a small but active government in a nation defined by aspiration. He embraced the market and the transportation and communications revolutions beginning to take hold, and helped give birth to the modern industrial economy. Lincoln's vision of an upwardly mobile society that rewards and supports individual striving was wondrously realized. Now, it is under threat. Economic stagnation...

"After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party's nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political...

"The first of a multi-volume history of Lincoln as a political genius--from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, assassination, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. This first volume traces Lincoln from his painful youth, describing himself as 'a slave, ' to his emergence as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. From his youth as a 'newsboy, ' a voracious newspaper reader, Lincoln became a free thinker, reading...

"An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer. Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution--a system he regarded as the "last best hope of mankind." But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In...