Download or read book Lincoln s Confidant written by Wayne C. Temple and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary Lincoln scholar Wayne C. Temple comes the long-awaited full-length biography of Noah Brooks, the influential Illinois journalist who championed Abraham Lincoln in Illinois state politics and became his almost daily companion at the White House. Best remembered as one of the president's few true intimates, Brooks was also a nationally recognized man of letters, who mingled with the likes of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Temple draws on archives and papers long thought lost to re-create Brooks's colorful life and relationship with Lincoln. Brooks's closeness to the president made him privy to Lincoln's thoughts on everything from literature to spirituality. Their frank conversations contributed to the wealth of journalism and personal observations that would make Brooks's writings a much-quoted source for historians and biographers of Lincoln. A carefully researched and well-documented scholarly resource, Lincoln's Confidant is the story of an extraordinary friendship by one of the luminaries of Lincoln scholarship.
Download or read book Mrs Lincoln s Dressmaker written by Jennifer Chiaverini and published by Dutton. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini's compelling historical novel unveils the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln through the perspective of the First Lady's most trusted confidante and friend, her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. In a life that spanned nearly a century and witnessed some of the most momentous events in American history, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born a slave. A gifted seamstress, she earned her freedom by the skill of her needle, and won the friendship of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln by her devotion. A sweeping historical novel, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker illuminates the extraordinary relationship the two women shared, beginning in the hallowed halls of the White House during the trials of the Civil War and enduring almost, but not quite, to the end of Mrs. Lincoln's days.
Download or read book Mary Lincoln s Dressmaker written by Becky Rutberg and published by Walker & Company. This book was released on 1995 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the life of a woman who spent thirty years in slavery and later worked in the White House
Download or read book Lincoln and the Jews written by Jonathan D. Sarna and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America. Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing "Christian nation," for example, with "this nation under God"—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D. Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America.
Download or read book Courting Mr Lincoln written by Louis Bayard and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A miracle; an exquisite story exquisitely told . . . If you love Jane Austen, or Hamilton, or fiction—of any era—that transports and transforms in equal measure, look no further.” —A.J. Finn, bestselling author of The Woman in the Window From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln, the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a young, marriageable Mary Todd and Lincoln’s best friend, Joshua Speed. When sparky and independent Mary Todd arrives in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1840s to live with her sister, who is determined to find Mary a husband, she is astonished to find herself drawn to an awkward, melancholic lawyer with a gift for oratory. The two share ambition, an obsession with politics—and a need to be suitably married off. Always at Lincoln’s side, however, is the charming Joshua Speed, a shopkeeper who became his mentor in society, loyal friend, roommate—and possible lover. Told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Todd and Speed, this witty, psychologically astute, and brilliantly plotted novel follows the threesome during Todd and Lincoln’s tumultuous courtship, with all the suspense and delight of the best Jane Austen novels. Historians have long speculated that Lincoln and Speed had a romantic relationship, and here Bayard explores that forbidden possibility with deep empathy. Rich with both period detail and contemporary insight, Courting Mr. Lincoln offers smart storytelling at the highest level.
Download or read book BEHIND THE SCENES 30 Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House written by Elizabeth Keckley and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully crafted ebook: "BEHIND THE SCENES – 30 Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Behind the Scenes (1868) is both a slave narrative and a portrait of the First Family of America, especially of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln. After the assassination of President Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley the former slave turned confidant and dress maker of Mrs. Lincoln took it upon herself to provide financial support to her by writing this slave narrative. But in spite of Keckley's good intentions the publication of her life story spelled doom for her own career and her friendship with the Lincolns to an extent that all efforts were made to suppress and falsify it. Yet this book has survived all odds and has now become an important document on Anti-Slavery and the Lincolns. A must read for anyone who is interested in American History! Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was a former slave who became a successful dressmaker, civil rights activist, and author in Washington, DC. Her relationship with Mary T. Lincoln was notable for its personal quality and intimacy. Besides, Keckley was also deeply committed to programs of racial improvement and protection. She helped in founding the Home for Destitute Women and Children and taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
Download or read book Your Friend Forever A Lincoln written by Charles B. Strozier and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history. Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.
Download or read book House of Abraham written by Stephen Berry and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning historian Berry charts the devastating effects of the Civil Waron Mary Todd Lincoln's family, and the surprising impact this struggle had onthe president.
Download or read book Mrs Lincoln s Rival written by Jennifer Chiaverini and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker and Canary Girls reveals Mary Todd Lincoln’s very public social and political contest with Kate Chase Sprague in this astute and lively novel of the politics of state—set against the backdrop of Civil War Era Washington. Beautiful, intelligent, regal, and entrancing, young Kate Chase Sprague stepped into the role of establishing her thrice-widowed father, Salmon P. Chase, in Washington society as a Lincoln cabinet member and as a future presidential candidate. For her efforts, The Washington Star declared her “the most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her.” None, that is, but Mary Todd Lincoln. Though Mrs. Lincoln and her young rival held much in common—political acumen, love of country, and a resolute determination to help the men they loved achieve greatness—they could never be friends, for the success of one could come only at the expense of the other...
Download or read book Lincoln A Very Short Introduction written by Allen C. Guelzo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, peace, and his legacy. The book sets these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction--"the pursuit of happiness"--remains a fundamental dilemma even today. Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, "lived in the mind." Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
Download or read book Commander in Chief written by Geoffrey Perret and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning presidential biographer and military historian explains that in choosing to fight un-winnable wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, Presidents Truman, Johnson, and George W. Bush collectively sought to establish a presidency so powerful that they have created a permanent threat to the Constitution.
Download or read book The Writings of Abraham Lincoln written by Noah Brooks and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Above all, and to the latest day of his life, Lincoln was not ashamed to confess his ignorance of any subject; he never lost an opportunity to get instruction." -Noah Brooks, The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume VIII (Life of Lincoln) (1906) The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume VIII (Life of Lincoln) (1906) by Noah Brooks is an insightful biography which follows the entirety of Abraham Lincoln's life. This eighth volume in the series was written by one of the president's closest friends, Brooks. He sees Lincoln through a clear lens, shedding light on the president's human side as well as his political side. Also, included in this volume is a detailed index of events and people found in the book which was edited by Arthur Brooks Lapsley. This intriguing volume is for all who enjoy the classic tale of a man who rises from nothing to great heights.
Download or read book The Emancipator s Wife written by Barbara Hambly and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2005-01-25 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a girl growing up in Kentucky, she lived a sheltered, privileged life filled with picnics and plantation balls. Vivacious, impulsive, and intoxicated by politics, she is a Todd of Lexington, an aristocratic family whose ancestors defeated the British. But no one knows her secret fears and anxieties. Although she is courted by the most eligible suitors in the land, including future senator Stephen Douglas, it is a gangly lawyer from Illinois who captures her heart. After a stormy courtship and a broken engagement, Abraham Lincoln will marry twenty-four-year-old Mary Todd and give her a ring inscribed with the words “Love Is Eternal.” But their happiness won’t last nearly so long. Their first child will be born under the gathering clouds of a civil war, and three more follow. As Lincoln’s star rises, the pleasure-loving Mary learns, often the hard way, the rules of being a politician’s wife. But by the time the fiery storm of war passes, tragedy will have claimed two sons, scandal will shadow her days as First Lady, and an assassin’s bullet will take Lincoln himself, leaving Mary alone and all but forgotten by the nation that owed her husband its survival. Yet it is in the years to come that Mary Todd Lincoln will truly come into her own. In public, she will fight to preserve Lincoln’s memory even as she battles a bitterly contested insanity trial. In private, she will struggle with depression and addiction as she endures the betrayals–both real and imagined–of family and friends. With a gifted novelist’s imagination and a historian’s eye for detail, Barbara Hambly tells a story of astonishing scope, richly peopled with real-life characters and their fictional counterparts, a tour-de-force tale of power, politics, and the role of women in nineteenth- century America. The result is a Mary Todd Lincoln few have seen and none will forget–the fascinating, controversial woman of whom her husband could say: “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out”–Mary Todd, the woman who loved Abraham Lincoln.
Download or read book Giant in the Shadows written by Jason Emerson and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER, Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2013! University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools, 2013 edition Although he was Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s oldest and last surviving son, the details of Robert T. Lincoln’s life are misunderstood by some and unknown to many others. Nearly half a century after the last biography about Abraham Lincoln’s son was published, historian and author Jason Emerson illuminates the life of this remarkable man and his achievements in Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Emerson, after nearly ten years of research, draws upon previously unavailable materials to offer the first truly definitive biography of the famous lawyer, businessman, and statesman who, much more than merely the son of America’s most famous president, made his own indelible mark on one of the most progressive and dynamic eras in United States history. Born in a boardinghouse but passing his last days at ease on a lavish country estate, Robert Lincoln played many roles during his lifetime. As a president’s son, a Union soldier, an ambassador to Great Britain, and a U.S. secretary of war, Lincoln was indisputably a titan of his age. Much like his father, he became one of the nation’s most respected and influential men, building a successful law practice in the city of Chicago, serving shrewdly as president of the Pullman Car Company, and at one time even being considered as a candidate for the U.S. presidency. Along the way he bore witness to some of the most dramatic moments in America’s history, including Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; the advent of the railroad, telephone, electrical, and automobile industries; the circumstances surrounding the assassinations of three presidents of the United States; and the momentous presidential election of 1912. Giant in the Shadows also reveals Robert T. Lincoln’s complex relationships with his famous parents and includes previously unpublished insights into their personalities. Emerson reveals new details about Robert’s role as his father’s confidant during the brutal years of the Civil War and his reaction to his father’s murder; his prosecution of the thieves who attempted to steal his father’s body in 1876 and the extraordinary measures he took to ensure it would never happen again; as well as details about the painful decision to have his mother committed to a mental facility. In addition Emerson explores the relationship between Robert and his children, and exposes the actual story of his stewardship of the Lincoln legacy—including what he and his wife really destroyed and what was preserved. Emerson also delves into the true reason Robert is not buried in the Lincoln tomb in Springfield but instead was interred at Arlington National Cemetery. Meticulously researched, full of never-before-seen photographs and new insight into historical events, Giant in the Shadows is the missing chapter of the Lincoln family story. Emerson’s riveting work is more than simply a biography; it is a tale of American achievement in the Gilded Age and the endurance of the Lincoln legacy.
Download or read book The Insanity File written by Mark E. Neely and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1993-03-31 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1875 Robert Todd Lincoln caused his mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, to be committed to an insane asylum. Based on newly discovered manuscript materials, this book seeks to explain how and why. In these documents—marked by Robert Todd Lincoln as the "MTL Insanity File"—exists the only definitive record of the tragic story of Mary Todd Lincoln’s insanity trial. The book that results from these letters and documents addresses several areas of controversy in the life of the widow of Abraham Lincoln: the extent of her illness, the fairness of her trial, and the motives of those who had her committed for treatment. Related issues include the status of women under the law as well as the legal and medical treatment of insanity. Speculating on the reasons for her mental condition, the authors note that Mrs. Lincoln suffered an extraordinary amount of tragedy in a relatively few years. Three of her four sons died very young, and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. After the death of her son Willie she maintained a darkly rigorous mourning for nearly three years, prompting the president to warn her that excessive woe might force him to send her to "that large white house on the hill yonder," the government hospital for the insane. Mrs. Lincoln also suffered anxiety about money, charting an exceptionally erratic financial course. She had spent lavishly during her husband’s presidency and at his death found herself deeply in debt. She had purchased trunkfuls of drapes to hang over phantom windows. 84 pairs of kid gloves in less than a month, and $3,200 worth of jewelry in the three months preceding Lincoln’s assassination. She followed the same erratic course for the rest of her life, creating in herself a tremendous anxiety. She occasionally feared that people were trying to kill her, and in 1873 she told her doctor that an Indian spirit was removing wires from her eyes and bones from her cheeks. Her son assembled an army of lawyers and medical experts who would swear in court that Mrs. Lincoln was insane. The jury found her insane and in need of treatment in an asylum. Whether the verdict was correct or not, the trial made Mary Lincoln desperate. Within hours of the verdict she would attempt suicide. In a few months she would contemplate murder. Since then every aspect of the trial has been criticized—from the defense attorney to the laws in force at the time. Neely and McMurtry deal with the trial, the commitment of Mary Todd Lincoln, her release, and her second trial. An appendix features letters and fragments by Mrs. Lincoln from the "Insanity File." The book is illustrated by 25 photographs.
Download or read book Behind the Scenes written by Elizabeth Keckley and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revealing memoir of a woman who bought her freedom from slavery and became a White House dressmaker and confidant to Mary Todd Lincoln. Born into slavery in Virginia, Elizabeth Keckley was whipped, sexually abused, and separated from her mother for long stretches of time. When her master eventually settled in St. Louis, Missouri, Keckley resolved to buy her freedom. She put to use her talents as a seamstress and found patrons among the wives of the city’s elite, eventually earning enough money to move with her young son to Washington, DC. In the nation’s capital, Keckley started her own business and soon had commissions from the wives of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, and Edwin Stanton. Hired by Mary Todd Lincoln to be her personal modiste, Keckley formed a close friendship with the first lady, a relationship strengthened by the tragedies they endured together, including the deaths of their sons and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Published to great controversy in 1868, Behind the Scenes offers an intimate and revealing portrait of life inside the White House as well as the stirring story of one woman’s fight to rise above the horrors of slavery. Frequently cited in studies of the Civil War and biographies of the Lincolns, it is a must read for students of American history. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Download or read book Herndon on Lincoln written by William H. Herndon and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-01-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, William H. Herndon began work on a brief, "subjective" biography of his former law partner, but his research turned up such unexpected and often startling information that it became a lifelong obsession. The biography finally published in 1889, Herndon's Lincoln, was a collaboration with Jesse W. Weik in which Herndon provided the materials and Weik did almost all the writing. For this reason, and because so much of what Herndon had to say about Lincoln was not included in the biography, David Donald has observed, "To understand Herndon's own rather peculiar approach to Lincoln biography, one must go back to his letters." An exhaustive collection of what Herndon was told by others about Lincoln was published by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis in Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln . In this new volume, Wilson and Davis have produced a comprehensive edition of what Herndon himself wrote about Lincoln in his own letters. Because of Herndon's close association with Lincoln, his intimate acquaintance with his partner's legal and political careers, and because he sought out informants who knew Lincoln and preserved information that might otherwise have been lost, his letters have become an indispensable resource for Lincoln biography. Unfiltered by a collaborator and rendered in Herndon's own distinctive voice, these letters constitute a matchless trove of primary source material. Herndon on Lincoln: Letters is a must for libraries, research institutions, and students of a towering American figure and his times.
