Author: Kenneth J. Winkle Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393240576 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
The stirring history of a president and a capital city on the front lines of war and freedom. In the late 1840s, Representative Abraham Lincoln resided at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. Known as Abolition House, Mrs. Sprigg’s hosted lively dinner-table debates of antislavery politics by the congressional boarders. The unusually rapid turnover in the enslaved staff suggested that there were frequent escapes north to freedom from Abolition House, likely a cog in the underground railroad. These early years in Washington proved formative for Lincoln. In 1861, now in the White House, Lincoln could gaze out his office window and see the Confederate flag flying across the Potomac. Washington, DC, sat on the front lines of the Civil War. Vulnerable and insecure, the capital was rife with Confederate sympathizers. On the crossroads of slavery and freedom, the city was a refuge for thousands of contraband and fugitive slaves. The Lincoln administration took strict measures to tighten security and established camps to provide food, shelter, and medical care for contrabands. In 1863, a Freedman’s Village rose on the grounds of the Lee estate, where the Confederate flag once flew. The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4 riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the “One-Legged Brigade” assembled outside the White House as “orators,” their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. The administration built more than one hundred military hospitals to care for Union casualties. These are among the unforgettable scenes in Lincoln’s Citadel, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.
Author: Mary A. DeCredico Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813179289 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 197
Book Description
Richmond, Virginia: pride of the founding fathers, doomed capital of the Confederate States of America. Unlike other Southern cities, Richmond boasted a vibrant, urban industrial complex capable of producing crucial ammunition and military supplies. Despite its northern position, Richmond became the Confederacy's beating heart—its capital, second-largest city, and impenetrable citadel. As long as the city endured, the Confederacy remained a well-supplied and formidable force. But when Ulysses S. Grant broke its defenses in 1865, the Confederates fled, burned Richmond to the ground, and surrendered within the week. Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life's daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Here, barricaded against a siege, staunch Unionists became a dangerous fifth column, refugees flooded the streets, and women organized a bread riot in the city. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, author Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond's economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South's industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.
Author: Allen C. Guelzo Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199743746 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 162
Book Description
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.
Author: James L. Swanson Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061803979 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 498
Book Description
Now an Apple TV+ Series “A terrific narrative of the hunt for Lincoln’s killers that will mesmerize the reader from start to finish.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history--the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry troops on a wild, 12-day chase from the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness. Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln’s own blood relics Manhunt is a fully documented, fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, it is history as it’s never been read before.
Author: Thomas J. Dilorenzo Publisher: Forum Books ISBN: 0307559386 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War Most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest president in history. His legend as the Great Emancipator has grown to mythic proportions as hundreds of books, a national holiday, and a monument in Washington, D.C., extol his heroism and martyrdom. But what if most everything you knew about Lincoln were false? What if, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves, Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in american history in order to build an empire that rivaled Great Britain's? In The Real Lincoln, author Thomas J. DiLorenzo uncovers a side of Lincoln not told in many history books--and overshadowed by the immense Lincoln legend. Through extensive research and meticulous documentation, DiLorenzo portrays the sixteenth president as a man who devoted his political career to revolutionizing the American form of government from one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralized—as the Founding Fathers intended—to a highly centralized, activist state. Standing in his way, however, was the South, with its independent states, its resistance to the national government, and its reliance on unfettered free trade. To accomplish his goals, Lincoln subverted the Constitution, trampled states' rights, and launched a devastating Civil War, whose wounds haunt us still. According to this provacative book, 600,000 American soldiers did not die for the honorable cause of ending slavery but for the dubious agenda of sacrificing the independence of the states to the supremacy of the federal government, which has been tightening its vise grip on our republic to this very day. In The Real Lincoln, you will discover a side of Lincoln that you were probably never taught in school—a side that calls into question the very myths that surround him and helps explain the true origins of a bloody, and perhaps, unnecessary war.
Author: John Avlon Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1982108142 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
A groundbreaking and “affecting and powerful” (The New York Times Book Review) history of Abraham Lincoln’s plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War—a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world’s most famous peacemakers. As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous two-week trip to visit the troops on the front lines accompanied by his young son, seeing combat up close, meeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond, and comforting wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. The power of Lincoln’s personal example in the closing days of the war offers a portrait of a peacemaker. He did not demonize people he disagreed with. He used humor, logic, and scripture to depolarize bitter debates. Balancing moral courage with moderation, Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but he understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength. Ulysses S. Grant’s famously generous terms of surrender to General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox that April were an expression of a president’s belief that a soft peace should follow a hard war. While his assassination sent the country careening off course, Lincoln’s vision would be vindicated long after his death, inspiring future generations in their own quests to secure a just and lasting peace. As US General Lucius Clay, architect of the post-WWII German occupation said when asked what guided his decisions: “I tried to think of the kind of occupation the South would have had if Abraham Lincoln had lived.” Lincoln and the Fight for Peace reveals with “its graceful prose and wise insights” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America) how Lincoln’s character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us. But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln’s plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony, but in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today.
Author: Richard Wertime Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0374529140 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
A warped dream, an overbearing father, and his son A handsome, brilliant man, the author's father-irascible, strong-willed, a compulsive womanizer-stands at the center of this strangely compelling story. In the mid-1970s, after a life in government service, which was shadowy in its depths, Ted Wertime built a fortress-like house on a mountaintop in south-central Pennsylvania. He had forged for himself a secondary career as a highly respected historian of ancient science and technology, and was convinced that it was his fate to lead a sweeping revolution that would cleanse the United States of energy abuse, political corruption, and an odd assortment of social ills. His "citadel" would serve as his revolutionary headquarters. He, his wife, and Joan, the last and most troubled of his succession of mistresses, lived in the house together in a bizarre ménage à trois. His dream was to recruit his four sons to take part in his cause. The author, Richard Wertime, is the second-oldest son. Citadel on the Mountain is the story of his struggle to escape from a domineering and, at times, hypnotizing father who sought to control the sexual and professional lives of his offspring.
Author: Alexander Macaulay Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820326518 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
The author presents the Citadel as a reflection of national debates and shifts in life and culture. Subjects range from race, gender, and citizenship to the rise of the counter-culture and the demise of the Cold War.
Author: John Williams Green Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 0813159377 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
John W. Green (1841-1920), an enlisted man with Kentucky's famed Confederate Orphan Brigade throughout the Civil War, fought at Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Atlanta and many other crucial battles. An acute observer with a flair for humanizing the impersonal horror of war, he kept a record of his experiences, and penned an exciting front-line account of America's defining trial by fire. Albert D. Kirwan provides a brief history of the Orphan Brigade and a biography of Johnny Green. Introductions to each chapter explain references in the journal and also set the context for the major campaigns.
Author: Diller Scofidio + Renfro Publisher: Damiani Limited ISBN: 9788862082440 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The redesign of Lincoln Center is one of the most challenging and innovative civic projects in recent urban history. Over the past eight years Diller Scofi dio + Renfro, in close collaboration with Lincoln Center's leadership, has transformed the fi fty year old Modernist citadel into a porous and democratic campus. This visually rich document is the first comprehensive book to feature the extensive redevelopment in its entirety. Through a combination of photographs, drawings, renderings, archival records and texts, the book describes the innovative strategies that have dissolved the public/private divide and effectively turned the campus inside-out, extending the spectacle of the performance halls into the Center's mute public spaces and surrounding streets. Conceived as a cross between an art book, a scholarly record, and an architectural diary this publication demonstrates how the recent redesign both respects and challenges preconceived notions about Lincoln Center and its ongoing role as a cultural hub in an ever-changing city. This unorthodox publication is comprised entirely of gatefolds; a series of inside-out centerfolds where the exterior pages of each spread feature glossy, large-format, full-bleed photographs highlighting different parts of the campus. Inside the gatefolds, tucked behind these lush photos, is a series of "back stories" that reveal the surprising evolution and unexpected afterlife of the same spaces.
Author: Kenneth J. Winkle
Author: Mary A. DeCredico
Author: Allen C. Guelzo
Author: James L. Swanson
Author: Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Author: John Avlon
Author: Richard Wertime
Author: Alexander Macaulay
Author: John Williams Green
Author: Diller Scofidio + Renfro