Unique among the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferguson saw two eighteenth-century revolutions, the American and the French. This monograph contains essays that range across all of Ferguson's works to investigate his engagement with contemporary events and his contributions to our understanding of history and human action.

This work is a summary and analysis of Abraham Lincoln's religion. This study begins with a description of the earliest relations Mr. Lincoln had with religion, his parents' dedication to a sect known as the "Separate Baptists." By late adolescence, Lincoln began to reject his parents' faith, and he appears to have been a religious skeptic until his marriage to Mary Todd. After his marriage, he attended Protestant services with his wife and family, but there was little evidence that he was deeply religious in that time. Lincoln knew the Scriptures quite well, but it was not until the death of his two sons, Eddie in 1850 and Willie in 1862, that as the sixteenth president put it, "He became more intensely concerned with God's Plan for human kind."