Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President - Hardcover

Lamb, Brian; Swain, Susan; C-SPAN

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586486764 ISBN 13: 9781586486761

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2008

Synopsis

In a handsome, gift-quality volume celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, America's top Lincoln historians offer their diverse perspectives on the life and legacy of America's sixteenth president. Spanning Lincoln's life—from his early career as a Springfield lawyer, to his presidential reign during one of America's most troubled historical periods, to his assassination in 1865—these essays, developed from original C-SPAN interviews, provide a compelling, composite portrait of Lincoln, one that offers up new stories and fresh insights on a defining leader.

Edited by C-SPAN's Brian Lamb and Susan Swain, illustrated with Lamb's photographs of Lincoln landmarks, and promoted throughout the year on C-SPAN, Abraham Lincoln is a wonderful compendium of information and deeply-informed analysis that deserves a prominent place on every bookshelf.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Lamb is C-SPAN's chairman and CEO and longtime on-camera interviewer, noted for his just the facts” style of interviewing. Many of the essays in this book are drawn from Booknotes, Lamb's long-running author-interview program, while others were conducted for C-SPAN's special history series on Lincoln and on the American presidency. Lamb lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Susan Swain is President & co-Chief Operating Officer of C-SPAN. For more than twenty-five years, she has been an on-air interviewer for the program. A regular moderator of Washington Journal, she's interviewed hundreds of members of Congress, policy experts, journalists, and several presidents. She lives in Northern Virginia.

From Booklist

There are about 16,000 books on Abraham Lincoln, and authors of about 50 of them (augmented by several non-Lincoln historians with opinions about the sixteenth U.S. president) appear in this edited compilation of C-SPAN interviews. Culled from the network’s various book programs, they omit the questions put by host-editor Brian Lamb and his colleagues, but the relaxed directness that is his signature is detectable in the historians’ replies. Answers by anecdote abound, indicating Lamb perhaps asked “Who was Ann Rutledge?” or “Was Lincoln a racist?” in addition to covering every other curiosity the reading public has about Lincoln. That curiosity shows no signs of subsiding and every one of surging for the February 2009 bicentennial. This volume’s review of the past 15 years of Lincoln authorial effort demonstrates how interpretively vibrant the subject remains, still capable of producing original research such as Matthew Pinsker’s Lincoln’s Sanctuary (2003), despite or perhaps due to Lincoln’s “biographical inaccessibility,” as Mark Neely comments. With content from history heavyweights David Herbert Donald, James McPherson, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, this will be in high demand for the bicentennial. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1586486764
• ISBN 13: 9781586486761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416