Did Lincoln Own Slaves?: And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln

Over the course of nine years as scholar-in-residence at the Lincoln Museum, Gerald J. Prokopowicz answered thousands of questions about Abraham Lincoln. Reporters, researchers, students, and especially the 50,000 visitors who come to the museum every year all want to know about the nation's most famous president. Although there have been more books written about Lincoln than any other American, there has never been a single book that clearly answers the most important, most unusual, most provocative, and most frequently asked questions. Until now.

Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln draws on the questions that people actually ask. Some are personal: Did Lincoln keep any pets? Some are inspired by recent reinterpretations of Lincoln's actions: Was Lincoln a racist? Some are questions that previous generations of historians considered inappropriate: Was Lincoln gay? Whether drawn from today's headlines (Did Lincoln's presidential actions violate the Constitution?) or from today's tabloids (Did doctors really raise Lincoln from the dead?), the questions in Did Lincoln Own Slaves? illuminate what people really want to know about the past.

Prokopowicz has organized the questions along the time line of Lincoln's life to give us a portrait of the sixteenth president unlike any we have had before. His authoritative, often surprising responses illuminate facets of Lincoln's life, work, and legacy about which people remain endlessly curious.

Gerald J. Prokopowicz served for nine years as the Lincoln Scholar at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is the author of the critically acclaimed All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861-1862 and was the editor of Lincoln Lore, the quarterly journal of the Lincoln Museum. He is a frequent public speaker on Lincoln-related topics and a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Advisory Committee. He is currently chair of the history department at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.