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A Lincoln scholar and performer brings the warmth, wisdom, and humor of our sixteenth president alive in a collection of inspiring quotations on achievement, responsibility, simplicity, and other timeless values that form the foundation of a meaningful life. The Words Lincoln Lived By is a stirring, inspirational treasury of quotations from our greatest and most admired president. Composed of Lincoln’s profound observations—one for every week of the year, each followed by a short commentary that provides historical context—the book offers rich material for interpretation, reflection, and spiritual guidance. In these pages, Lincoln, famed as an orator, shares his wisdom on courage and determination, compassion and compromise, tolerance and tact—the essential traits that define character. The timeless impact of his words is as powerful as the achievements that have helped to make him an American hero.

Examination of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame breathing new life into the words and revealing much about the President.

Love Obama or hate him, you will be surprised to learn how many parallels there are between the 16th President and the 44th President. Even their times are alike. Some similarities are obvious and predictable, but others are fascinating, uncanny, mysterious. And, what is most important, the similarities matter. Written by Gene Griessman, author of "The Words Lincoln Lived By" and "Lincoln On Communication," this is the fascinating account of two obscure Illinois lawyer-politicians — separated by 150 years — who against all odds come to the White House. Unlikely Presidents. This is an American story about success and failure, ambition and hatred, politics and passion.

One of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union, examines the four months between Lincoln's election and inauguration, when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency -- there would be no compromise on slavery or secession of the slaveholding states, even at the cost of civil war. Abraham Lincoln first demonstrated his determination and leadership in the Great Secession Winter -- the four months between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 -- when he rejected compromises urged on him by Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, that might have preserved the Union a little longer but would have enshrined slavery for generations. Though Lincoln has been criticized by many historians for failing to appreciate the severity of the secession crisis that greeted his victory, Harold Holzer shows that the presidentelect waged a shrewd and complex campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery while vainly trying to limit secession to a few Deep South states. During this most dangerous White House transition in American history, the country had two presidents: one powerless (the president-elect, possessing no constitutional authority), the other paralyzed (the incumbent who refused to act). Through limited, brilliantly timed and crafted public statements, determined private letters, tough political pressure, and personal persuasion, Lincoln guaranteed the integrity of the American political process of majority rule, sounded the death knell of slavery, and transformed not only his own image but that of the presidency, even while making inevitable the war that would be necessary to make these achievements permanent. Lincoln President-Elect is the first book to concentrate on Lincoln's public stance and private agony during these months and on the momentous consequences when he first demonstrated his determination and leadership. Holzer recasts Lincoln from an isolated prairie politician yet to establish his greatness, to a skillful shaper of men and opinion and an immovable friend of freedom at a decisive moment when allegiance to the founding credo "all men are created equal" might well have been sacrificed.

In The House I Live In, award-winning historian Robert J. Norrell offers a truly masterful chronicle of American race relations over the last one hundred and fifty years. This scrupulously fair and insightful narrative--the most ambitious and wide-ranging history of its kind--sheds new light on the ideologies, from white supremacy to black nationalism, that have shaped race relations since the Civil War. For, Norrell argues, it is ideology, more than politics or economics, that has powerfully sculpted the landscape of race in America. Beginning with Reconstruction, Norrell shows how the democratic values of liberty and equality were infused with new meaning by Abraham Lincoln, yet soon became meaningless for generations of African Americans, as white supremacy drove a wedge between the races. Indeed, the heart of this book paints a vivid portrait of the long, dangerous struggle of African Americans to defeat this pernicious mode of thought. Along the way, Norrell offers fresh and at times controversial appraisals of figures such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and dissects the ideas of racists such as novelist Thomas Dixon. Most important, he offers striking new insights into black-white history, observing for instance that the Civil Rights movement really began as early as the 1930s, and that contrary to much recent writing, the Cold War was a setback rather than a boost to the quest for racial justice. He also breaks new ground on the role of popular culture and mass media in first promoting, but later helping defeat, notions of white supremacy. Though the struggle for equality is far from over, Norrell writes that today we are closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of our democratic values, a promise first made by Lincoln at the battlefield of Gettysburg.