It remains without question the most memorable and memorized speech in American history. In 272 words, spoken on November 19, 1863, among the freshly dug graves of the Union dead at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln evoked and distilled the profound significance of the terrible war in which the nation was engaged. This volume aims to place Lincoln's words in their full context. Edited by the country's leading scholars, including Sean Wilentz,...

A brilliant, authoritative, and riveting account of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln's presidency, when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War. On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was perhaps the most tumultuous six months of...

"A nation shattered by its president's murder Two diaries that reveal the true scope of an American conspiracy A detective determined to bring the truth to light, no matter what it costs him From award-winning journalist Timothy L. O'Brien comes a gripping historical thriller that poses a provocative question: What if the plot to assassinate President Lincoln was wider and more sinister than we ever imagined? In late spring of 1865, as America mourns...

"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...

Freedom Rising is a fresh, intensely human account of how the Civil War transformed the nation's capital from the debating forum for a loose union of states into the seat of a forceful central government. Before 1861, Washington was a dusty, muddy city of 60,000, joked about by urban sophisticates from New York and Boston. But at the onset of war, thousands of soldiers, job seekers, nurses, good-time girls, gamblers, newly freed slaves-all kinds of...

Master storyteller and bestselling historian H. W. Brands narrates 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...

Told through the eyes of a young boy, the sober mood of the country after the Lincoln assassination is presented as he and many other mourners await to pay their respects to their fallen president as Lincoln's funeral train travels from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, IL in 1865.

When a schoolgirl gets separated from her tour of the White House and finds herself in the Lincoln bedroom, she also discovers the ghost of the great man himself.

"In February 1861 newly elected President Abraham Lincoln set out on a triumphant 2,000 mile cross-country railroad trip that would take him to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. At the same time, a band of fanatic southern Confederate sympathizers decided to stop Lincoln from reaching Washington and taking office. Furious because the new president's desire to end slavery threatened their way of life, they devised a secret plan: Lincoln would be...

In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation's demographics, culture, and--perhaps most significantly--voting patterns. America's newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape, and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln's rise ran parallel to this turmoil;...