Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory - Hardcover

Schwartz, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226741974 ISBN 13: 9780226741970

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Synopsis

Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Barry Schwartz aims at these contradictions in his study of Lincoln's reputation, from the president's death through the industrial revolution to his apotheosis during the Progressive Era and First World War.

Schwartz draws on a wide array of materials—painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspapers and oratory—to examine the role that Lincoln's memory has played in American life. He explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions, and how his reputation diminished and grew over the next four decades. Schwartz links transformations of Lincoln's image to changes in the society. Commemorating Lincoln helped Americans to think about their country's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and to articulate the way economic and political reform, military power, ethnic and race relations, and nationalism enhanced their conception of themselves as one people.

Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp," acting at once as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities. The first part of a study that will continue through the present, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively around images rooted in a real person whose character and achievements helped shape his country's future.

About this title

About the Author:

Barry Schwartz is a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia. He is the author or editor of four books, including George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An engaging scholarly study of the dynamic links between Lincoln's image and the rapidly changing American culture during the six decades after his assassination. Sociologist Schwartz (George Washington, not reviewed) wants to test sociological theories with historical evidence and bring history back into his own discipline. Fortunately, he also knows how to tell a good story. One needn't like sociology (which appears here only at the start and finish and is spread on lightly anyway) to learn much from his engrossing account of the sources of Lincoln's changing reputation between 1865 and the 1920s. (A forthcoming second volume will bring the story up to date.) Schwartz's approach differs from Merrill Peterson's Lincoln in American Memory (1994), which focused on the contents of Lincoln's image: Schwartz explores instead how public perception of Lincoln waxed and waned as it did (the 16th President was by no means universally admired during his lifetime). Drawing on a wide variety of sources (art and statuary, schoolbooks and speeches, and the efforts of reputational entrepreneurs), Schwartz shows that Lincoln came to be revered as he was as much on account of the needs of particular historical moments and groups in the population as because of his own deeds and words. In other words, Americans constructed Lincoln's image in their own. Such an argument will not surprise historians engaged in the scholarly industry of memory studies. But it reminds us of the complex interdependence of fact, memory, and culture. It also fills out our understanding of such specific phenomena as North-South reconciliation, military preparation, and race relations through the Progressive Era. And true to its sociological foundations, it reveals how images grow more from need than reality, and how reputations are as likely to be imposed as achieved. Anyone who wishes to learn more of Lincoln, the nation he helped govern, and the way memory serves social and cultural functions will gain from this highly illuminating work. (b&w illustrations not seen) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0226741974
• ISBN 13: 9780226741970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 382