Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Abraham Lincoln
Our most talented writer-president always wrote his own material and sweated hours over it
The president takes charge and directs a successful amphibious landing at Hampton Roads
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.
As we approach the bicentennial of his birth, leading historians look at the man and his achievements
The prairie lawyer president and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship
The prairie lawyer president and outspoken abolitionist formed an unusual friendship
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.
How Mount Vernon Rebuilt The First President
George Nelson Clocks
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.
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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Abraham Lincoln signed it. A lot of scholars say he didn’t write it. Now, newly discovered evidence helps solve an enduring mystery.
Who was the Widow Bixby?
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.
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 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 service-men 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 sons in the Civil War.
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 anniversary year, the Lin
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 George Washington— not Abraham Lincoln—slept here.
The great emancipator and the liberator of Kuwait get together in the newest White House portrait
From the moment he was first inspired to paint it, George Peter Alexander Healy harbored huge ambitions for the canvas he entitled The Peacemakers . The artist longed for it to be universally embraced as “a true historical picture,” cherished as the emblem of sectional reconciliation following the bloody Civil War.
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 Capt.
Unloved and unlovely, the fragile boats of the “Tinclad Navy” ventured, Lincoln said, “wherever the ground was a little damp,” and made a contribution to the Western war that has never been sufficiently appreciated
In the late summer and autumn of 1864 two brothers, Norman and George Carr, aged twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, left their upstate New York home of Union Springs to join the United States Navy. The motives that sent them may have been complex.
A historian of American portraits tells how he determines whether a picture is authentic—and why that authenticity matters
More than any other features, our faces are what mark us as unique individuals. Superficially our faces are who we are. Together with names they identify us with the lives we have lived; they are our perpetual calling cards.
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