Emphasizing the significance of his political and historical engagement, this work casts Abraham Lincoln as a cultural figure.

Abraham Lincoln's stature as an American cultural figure grows from his political legacy. In today's milieu, the speeches he delivered as the sixteenth president of the United States have become synonymous with American progress, values and exceptionalism. But what makes Lincoln's language so effective? Highlighting matters of style, affect, nationalism and history in nineteenth-century America, this collection examines the rhetorical power of Lincoln's prose – from the earliest legal decisions, stump speeches, anecdotes and letters, to the Gettysburg Address and the lingering power of the Second Inaugural Address. Through careful analysis of his correspondence with Civil War generals and his early poetry, the contributors, all literary and cultural critics, give readers a unique look into Lincoln's private life. Such a collection enables teachers, students, and readers of American history to assess the impact of this extraordinary writer – and rare politician – on the world's stage.

The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy explores the creation, and afterlife, of an American icon.

In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender, and desire over his thirty-year American career.

This definitive dual portrait offers a fresh perspective on Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant’s crucial role in elevating him to the presidency. The book also sheds new light on the influence that “Bryant and his class” (as Lincoln called the Radical Republican faction whose views Bryant articulated) wielded on the chief executive. How the cautious president and the preeminent editor of the Fourth Estate interacted—and how their ideological battle tilted gradually in Bryant’s favor—is the centerpiece of this study. A work of meticulous scholarship and a model of compression, Lincoln and Bryant is a watershed account of two Republicans fighting common enemies (and each other) during the Civil War era.

It was the measure of Shakespeare's poetic greatness, an early commentator remarked, that he thoroughly blended the ideal with the practical or realistic. “If this be so,” Walt Whitman wrote, "I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life." Whitman was only one of many to note the affinity between these two iconic figures. Novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have frequently shown Lincoln quoting Shakespeare. In Lincoln and Shakespeare, Michael Anderegg for the first time examines in detail Lincoln’s fascination with and knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays. Separated by centuries and extraordinary circumstances, the two men clearly shared a belief in the power of language and both at times held a fatalistic view of human nature. While citations from Shakespeare are few in his writings and speeches, Lincoln read deeply and quoted often from the Bard's work in company, a habit well documented in diaries, letters, and newspapers. Anderegg discusses Lincoln’s particular interest in Macbeth and Hamlet and in Shakespeare’s historical plays, where we see themes that resonated deeply with the president—the dangers of inordinate ambition, the horrors of civil war, and the corruptions of illegitimate rule. Anderegg winnows confirmed evidence from myth to explore how Lincoln came to know Shakespeare, which editions he read, and which plays he would have seen before he became president. Once in the White House, Lincoln had the opportunity of seeing the best Shakespearean actors in America. Anderegg details Lincoln's unexpected relationship with James H. Hackett, one of the most popular comic actors in America at the time: his letter to Hackett reveals his considerable enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Lincoln managed, in the midst of overwhelming matters of state, to see the actor's Falstaff on several occasions and to engage with him in discussions of how Shakespeare’s plays should be performed, a topic on which he had decided views. Hackett's productions were only a few of those Lincoln enjoyed as president, and Anderegg documents his larger theater-going experience, recreating the Shakespearean performances of Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Forrest, and others, as Lincoln saw them.

Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019 In this groundbreaking environmental biography of Abraham Lincoln, James Tackach maps Lincoln’s lifelong relationship with the natural world from his birth and boyhood on Midwestern farms through his political career and presidency dealing with the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Civil War. Lincoln was born in a generation that grew up on farms but began to move to cities as industrialization transformed the American economy. Turning away from the outdoor, manual labor of his youth, he chose careers in law and politics but always found solace outside first on the prairies of Illinois and, later, at the woodsy presidential retreat. As Tackach shows, Lincoln relied on examples and metaphors from the natural world in his speeches and writings. As a member of the Whig Party Lincoln endorsed the Industrial Revolution, which transformed the nation’s economy and its physical, social, and cultural landscapes, and advocated for the creation of railroads, canals, roads, and bridges to facilitate growth and the distribution of products. But he and his party failed to take steps to protect the natural environment. Surveying the destruction of the environment in the mid-nineteenth century, Tackach outlines how some American writers, the first voices for protection and conservation, began to call attention to the results of deforestation and the overhunting of animals during Lincoln’s lifetime. As commander in chief during the Civil War, Lincoln approved a strategy that included significant infrastructure and environmental damage. In the South, where most of the battles occurred, Union troops burned cities and towns and destroyed plantations, farms, and natural landscapes. Tackach argues that, midway through his presidency, Lincoln seemed to sense that postwar Reconstruction would have to be spiritual, political, economic, and environmental in order to heal the nation’s wounds. He signed the Morrill Act, creating the land-grant colleges, and the environmentally progressive Yosemite Grant Act, which preserved thousands of acres of forest in California. The first scholar to thoroughly investigate Lincoln’s lifelong relationship with the natural environment, Tackach paints Lincoln’s personal and professional life against the backdrop of nineteenth-century American environmental history, issues, and writers, providing insights into contemporary environmental issues.

Bancroft Prize–winning scholar David S. Reynolds edits and introduces a broad selection of Abraham Lincoln’s writings—from his earliest days through his last. Lincoln’s Selected Writings includes a rich selection of his public and private letters, speeches, eulogies, proposals, debate transcriptions, addresses (including the First and Second Inaugurals), and more. The texts are accompanied by explanatory annotations, a detailed preface, a note on the texts, and a list of abbreviations. Lincoln’s writings are followed by contemporary responses to him in poems, songs, and articles; representations of Lincoln in modern imaginative and nonfiction writing; and selections from recent cross-disciplinary studies of Lincoln—including discussions of his literary techniques and oratorical style as well as examinations of his political evolution in new cultural and social contexts. Among the many contributors are Horace Greeley, Jesse Hutchinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Walt Whitman. “Modern Views” presents sixteen major interpretations of Lincoln’s life, work, and legacy carefully chosen to promote discussion. The contributors are Carl Sandburg, Allen C. Guelzo, James Oakes, Gillian Silverman, Richard N. Current, Harold Holzer, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, Robert A. Ferguson, Gabor Boritt, James McPherson, Stephen Cushman, Faith Barrett, David S. Reynolds, and Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton. A chronology, selected bibliography, and index are also included.

"[A]n astonishingly interesting interpretation…Fox is wonderfully shrewd and often dazzling." —Jill Lepore, New York Times Book Review Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most beloved leader. The fact that he was lampooned in his day as "ugly and grotesque" only made Lincoln more endearing to millions. In Lincoln’s Body, acclaimed cultural historian Richard Wightman Fox explores how deeply, and how differently, Americans—black and white, male and female, Northern and Southern—have valued our sixteenth president, from his own lifetime to the Hollywood biopics about him. Lincoln continues to survive in a body of memory that speaks volumes about our nation.

Our ideas of statesmanship are fraught with seeming contradictions: The democratic statesman is true to the people’s wishes and views—but also capable of standing against popular opinion when necessary. The statesman rises above conflicts and seeks compromise between parties—but also stands firmly for what is right. Abraham Lincoln, perhaps more than any other political figure in US history, affords us an opportunity to evaluate the philosophical, political, and practical implications of these paradoxical propositions. Asking whether and how Lincoln acted in a statesmanly manner at critical moments, the authors of this volume aim to clarify what precisely statesmanship might be; their work illuminates important themes and events in Lincoln’s career even as it broadens and sharpens our understanding of the general nature of statesmanship. One of Lincoln’s abiding themes was foreshadowed in his Lyceum Address, delivered when he was not yet thirty: the call for the prevalence of a sort of public opinion that he characterized as a political religion. As it relates to democratic statesmanship, what does Lincoln’s political religion have to do with religion per se? How, in his role as statesman as a master of democratic speech, did Lincoln handle the two major issues he faced as a political leader: slavery and the war? In attempting to meet the demand that he use acceptable means to achieve his ends, did Lincoln—can any statesman—keep his hands clean? Are there inevitable transgressions that a statesman must commit? These are among the topics the authors take on as they consider Lincoln’s democratic and rhetorical statesmanship, on occasion drawing comparisons with his contemporaries Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas or even such a distant forerunner as Pericles. Finally, framing statesmanship in terms of three factors—knowledge of the political good of a community, circumstance, and the best possible action in light of these two—this volume renders a nuanced, deeply informed judgment on what distinguishes Lincoln as a statesman, and what distinguishes a statesman from a (mere) politician.