A new picture of prairie lawyers coping with bad roads and worse inns on the Illinois frontier, drawn from David Davis’ letters
Lincoln’s oration at New York’s Cooper Union showed that the prairie lawyer could play in the big leagues
On the frigid and stormy evening of February 27, 1860, so the newspapers reported, Abraham Lincoln climbed onto the stage of the cavernous Great Hall of New York’s newest college, Cooper Union, faced a room overflowing with people, and delivered the most important speech of his life.
Our most talented writer-president always wrote his own material and labored for hours over it.
The president takes charge and directs a successful amphibious landing at Hampton Roads.
In May 1862, two months after the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack ) fought to a draw in Hampton Roads, Virginia, President Abraham Lincoln traveled south from Washington on a revenue cutter to visit the Army of the Poto
Would the disastrous Reconstruction era have taken a different course?
What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated? Every time I lecture on Lincoln, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, someone in the audience is sure to pose this question—one, of course, perfectly natural to ask, but equally impossible to answer. This has not, however, deterred historians from speculating about this “counterfactual” problem.
The former prairie-lawyer and then-president and the ex-slave and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship.
The former prairie-lawyer and then-president and the ex-slave and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship.
As we approach the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, leading historians look at the man and his achievements.
During the campaign of 1860, and throughout what Henry Adams would justly call the “Great Secession Winter” that fell like a shadow after that year’s momentous presidential election, a convincing case could be made that Abraham Lincoln was totally unprepared to assume the natio
50 Years Ago
April 25, 1957 The Navy sends its Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean to support King Hussein of Jordan against an uprising by pro-Egyptian army officers.
Reading America’s Most Famous Speech
No presidential speech has been as widely analyzed, memorized, or canonized as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
George Nelson said he got into furniture design by accident, and indeed the architect didn’t actually create many of the mid-twentieth-century modernist icons synonymous with his name. The bubble lamp, the coconut chair, the sling sofa, and others he’s commonly credited with were styled by associates in his New York City office.
How Mount Vernon rebuilt the first president
The 3 Faces of George Washington The Buyable Past Resources The Gettysburg Gospen
Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it.
It’s a far cry from a log cabin
“Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good,” Abraham Lincoln once lectured a ne’er-do-well stepbrother ambitious to leave the family’s log cabin for greener pastures. Yet 10 years later, as President-elect, Lincoln admitted: “I hold the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”
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Of all the hundreds of personal letters Abraham Lincoln sent during his lifetime, none of the recipients remains more deeply shrouded in mystery than Lydia Bixby of Boston.
Abraham Lincoln signed it. A lot of scholars say he didn’t write it. Now, newly discovered evidence helps solve an enduring mystery.
No one has ever come up with a satisfactory count of the books dealing with the Civil War. Estimates range from 50,000 to more than 70,000, with new titles added every day.
Lincoln's depression as reflected in his poetry
Lincoln’s melancholy is famous. Less well-known is that he not only penned thoughts about suicide, but published them in a newspaper. Scholars have long believed that the only copy in the newspaper’s files was mutilated to hide those thoughts from posterity.
A student of the speech that changed Lincoln’s career visits the place where he gave it
How should a president honor the war dead?
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq last year, a small tempest has arisen in the media over whether or not George W. Bush should attend the funerals of American servicemen and women killed in the line of duty. As of this writing, Mr.
The events of 9/11 were horrific, almost beyond comprehension. But when our nation was sorely tried before, it emerged stronger and better than before.
The stirring Civil War document featured in Saving Private Ryan grew out of a lie and probably wasn’t really written by Lincoln.
Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s big movie of 1998, prefaces its plot with the very moving reading of a famous letter of condolence written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a widow in Boston who had lost five s
Some distinguished enthusiasts reveal just how they fell under his powerful spell.
Although Lincoln’s birthday has disappeared from our calendar of national holidays (swallowed up into the convenient but somehow unsatisfying Presidents’ Day), there is no dampening of enthusiasm among America’s “Lincoln people.” During this, his 190th annive
A stereo view discovered in a California flea market may show the president-elect embarked on a momentous journey.
It was, up to that point, the photo opportunity of the century.
For generations, Americans reserved their most fervent “landmark reverence” for those rooms that could boast that George Washington— not Abraham Lincoln—slept here.
The great emancipator and the liberator of Kuwait get together in the newest White House portrait.
Healy
Most of them were American soldiers who fought with skill, discipline, and high courage against a U.S. Army that numbered Ulysses Grant in its ranks. The year was 1847.
The court-martial of Captain John O’Reilly was one of 29 convened by the United States Army at the San Angel prison camp in Mexico on August 28, 1847: 36 other men of O’Reilly’s San Patricio Battalion faced courts-martial on that same day at nearby Tacubaya.