NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America. “Meacham has given us the Lincoln for our time.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize • Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents—a remote icon—or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincoln—an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment, essential to the story of justice in America, began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier in 1809 to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination in 1865: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end. In a nation shaped by the courage of the enslaved of the era and by the brave witness of Black Americans, Lincoln’s story illustrates the ways and means of politics in a democracy, the roots and durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to shape events.

First published in 1949 (this edition in 1968), this book is a dictionary of the past, exploring the language of the criminal and near-criminal worlds. It includes entries from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, as well as from Britain and America and offers a fascinating and unique study of language. The book provides an invaluable insight into social history, with the British vocabulary dating back to the 16th century and the American to the late 18th century. Each entry comes complete with the approximate date of origin, the etymology for each word, and a note of the milieu in which the expression arose.

Jonathan Sperber’s Revolutionary Europe 1780–1850 is a history of Europe in the age of the French Revolution, from the end of the old regime to the outcome of the revolutions of 1848. Fully revised and updated, this second edition provides a continent-wide history of the key political events and social transformation that took place within this turbulent period, extending as far as their effects within the European colonial society of the Caribbean. Key features include analyses of the movement from society’s old regime of orders to a civil society of property owners; the varied consequences of rapid population increase and the spread of market relations in the economy; and the upshot of these changes for political life, from violent revolutions and warfare to dramatic reforms and peaceful mass movements a lively account of the events of the period and a thorough analysis of the political, cultural and socioeconomic transformations that shaped them a look into the lives of ordinary people amidst the social and economic developments of the time a range of maps depicting the developments in Europe’s geographic scope between 1789 and 1848, including for the 1820, 1830 and 1848 revolutions. Revolutionary Europe 1780–1850 is the perfect introduction for students of the history of the French Revolution and the history of Europe more broadly.