William Seward

Bernard A. Weisberger | December 1990

The problem is classically simple to state, and impossibly difficult to solve. One country invades and subdues another. Third-party nations protest and insist on the aggressor’s withdrawal but are unwilling or unable to enforce their demand by war.

How We Got Lincoln

Peter Andrews | November 1988

Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then, the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But, after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.

In the crowded months between the beginning of the 1860 presidential campaign and the attack on Fort Sumter, it is easy now to see the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as something preordained, as though the issues had manufactured a figure commensurate with their importance.

Matters Of Fact

Geoffrey C. Ward | August/September 1984

Vidal’s Lincoln

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885, Lincoln’s old friend and law partner William H.

Targets Of Opportunity

Geoffrey C. Ward | April/May 1984

MATTERS OF FACT

“ASSASSINATION IS NOT an American practice or habit,” wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward on July 15, 1864, “and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.

Lincoln’s Life Preserver

Charles B. Strozier | February/March 1982

To stave off despair, the President relied on a sense of humor that was rich, self-deprecating—and surprisingly bawdy

A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham Lincoln once counseled his friend Joshua Speed, “will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” No aspect of Lincoln’s character has become more tangibly real in the literature than his melanch

What If?

Marcus Cunliffe | December 1982

Conjectural or speculative history can be a silly game, as in “What if the Roman legions had machine guns?” But this historian argues that to enlarge our knowledge and understanding it sometimes makes very good sense to ask …

What if any of the pre-Civil War Presidents had gone mad? What if Andrew Johnson had been successfully impeached? What if William McKinley had not been assassinated?

The Ten Best Secretaries Of State…

The Editors | December 1981

When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The current Secretary presides over almost fifteen thousand employees scattered around the globe.

Garibaldi And Lincoln

Herbert Mitgang | October 1975

Would the great fighter come over for the Union? Italian freedom and lead troops Lincoln hoped so

In the summer of 1861, when the newspaper generals in New York clamored for a clash of arms to put down the Confederate rebellion, the battle and the recriminations came sooner than expected.

The Relief Of Fort Pickens

James Cooley | February 1974

WAR WAS DAYS AWAY, A UNION STRONGHOLD WAS THREATENED, AND THROUGH A FOG OF RUMOR, DOUBT, CONTRADICTORY ORDERS, AND OUTRIGHT LIES THE ARMY AND NAVY SET OUT TO HELP

A good place to start the story is the Republican convention in Chicago in May, 1860. By long odds the leading candidate, and on form and experience the best qualified, was of course Senator William H. Seward of New York. He was eminent in the legal profession.

Tales From The Black Chambers

Clifford B. Hicks | April 1973

The making and breaking of codes and ciphers has played an exciting and often crucial part in American history

By choice, cryptographers are an unsung and anonymous lot. In war and peace they labor in their black chambers, behind barred doors, dispatching sheets of secret symbols and reading encoded messages from the innermost councils of foreign governments.

ASSASSINATION!

Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. | April 1965

Had there been a Warren Commission exactly a century ago, when Abraham Lincoln was shot, its report might have read like the somber, moving, and impressively researched book from which the following narrative is taken.

“Frozen Asset” Or Forty-ninth State?

October 1958

(Congress debates acquiring Alaska, 1867)

The Needless Conflict

Allan Nevins | August 1956

If Buchanan had met the Kansas problem firmly we might have avoided civil war
The fourth in a series on TIMES OF TRIAL IN AMERICAN STATECRAFT

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.