Since Abraham Lincoln's death, generations of Americans have studied his life, presidency, and leadership, often remaking him into a figure suited to the needs and interests of their own time. This illuminating volume takes a different approach to his political thought and practice. Here, a distinguished group of contributors argue that Lincoln's relevance today is best expressed by rendering an accurate portrait of him in his own era. They seek to understand Lincoln as he understood himself and as he attempted to make his ideas clear to his contemporaries. What emerges is a portrait of a prudent leader who is driven to return the country to its original principles in order to conserve it. The contributors demonstrate that, far from advocating an expansion of government beyond its constitutional limits, Lincoln defended both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In his introduction, Justice Clarence Thomas discusses how Lincoln used the ideological and structural underpinnings of those founding documents to defeat slavery and secure the liberties that the Republic was established to protect. Other chapters reveal how Lincoln upheld the principle of limited government even as he employed unprecedented war powers. Featuring contributions from leading scholars such as Michael Burlingame, Allen C. Guelzo, Fred Kaplan, and Matthew Pinsker, this innovative collection presents fresh perspectives on Lincoln both as a political thinker and a practical politician. Taken together, these essays decisively demonstrate that the most iconic American president still has much to teach the modern-day student of politics.

Winner, 2024 Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award The fighting prowess of United States Marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps’ humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. That oversight is fully rectified by Jason Bohm’s eye-opening Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775-1777. The story begins with the oppressive days that drove America into a conflict for which it was ill-prepared, when thirteen independent colonies commenced a war against the world’s most powerful military with nothing more than local militias, privateers, and other ad hoc units. The Continental Congress rushed to form an army and placed George Washington in command, but soon realized that America needed men who could fight on the sea and on land to win its freedom. Enter the Marines. Bohm artfully tells the story of the creation of the Continental Marines and the men who led them during the parallel paths followed by the Army and Marines in the opening years of the war and through the early successes and failures at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Canada, Boston, Charleston, and more. As Washington struggled to preserve his command after defeats in New York and New Jersey in 1776, the nascent U.S. Navy and Marines deployed the first American fleet, conducted their first amphibious operation, and waged a war on the rivers and seas to block British reinforcements and capture critically needed supplies. Desperate times forced Congress to detach the Continental Marines from the Navy to join the embattled army as Washington sought an “important stroke” to defeat his adversary. Washington’s Marines joined their fellow soldiers in a protracted land campaign that culminated in turning-point victories at Trenton, Assunpink Creek, and Princeton. This chapter of the Continental Marines ends in Morristown, New Jersey, when Washington granted Henry Knox’s request to leverage the Marines’ expertise with naval guns to fill the depleted ranks of the army’s artillery during the “Forage War.” Washington’s Marines is the first complete study of its kind to weave the men, strategy, performance, and personalities of the Corps’ formative early years into a single compelling account. The sweeping prose relies heavily on primary research and the author’s own extensive military knowledge. Enhanced with original maps and illustrations, Washington’s Marines will take its place as one of the finest studies of its kind.

Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and his two most influential ancestors--his mother and "the Virginia planter," a slaveholder, a shadowy grandfather he likely never met--is rarely mentioned in Lincoln biographies or in history texts. However, Lincoln, forever linked to the cause of freedom and equality in America, spoke candidly of the planter to his law partner, Billy Herndon, who recalled his words, "My mother inherited his qualities and I hers. All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my mother--God bless her." This vital two-generation relationship was nonetheless problematic. In Lincoln's boyhood the planter was a figure he ridiculed while in his young manhood the planter evolved into a role model whom Lincoln revered and associated with Jefferson's overdue ideal that "all men are created equal." Thus galvanized "by blood" to educate himself, to stand for election and to oppose slavery, Lincoln quit farming at age 22. This book explains how he thus followed an inherited family dream.

An analysis of the literary life of the sixteenth president explores the ways in which his views were shaped by classic literature and how he used language as a vehicle for complex ideas and an instrument of change in both political and personal arenas.