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Abraham Lincoln
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 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.
The nation’s first transcontinental motor route can still be experienced in all its obsolescent charm.
I had been driving across Pennsylvania’s hills and valleys for five hours when suddenly my destination for the evening appeared ahead.
Everyone knows that the bullet that John Wilkes Booth fired into Abraham Lincoln’s brain inflicted a terrible, mortal wound. But when a prominent neurosurgeon began to investigate the assassination, he discovered persuasive evidence that Lincoln’s doctors must share the blame with Booth’s derringer. Without their treatment, the president might very well have lived.
Three new studies offer important glimpses into a subject whose significance never dwindles.
The newspaperman Noah Brooks knew Abraham Lincoln well before he became president and grew so close to him during his time in Washington that he was being considered as a replacement for one of the president’s secretaries at the time of the assassination.
An interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton
On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House.
Alone among all American battlefields, the scene of the Civil War’s costliest encounter is patrolled by government-licensed historians who keep alive for visitors the memory of what happened there.
Like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him, Dave was a Michigan farmer. His great-grandfather had emigrated from Poland in 1X61, briefly worked in the Detroit area, then enlisted in the 24th Michigan.
A newly discovered document almost certainly written by the young Abraham Lincoln shows him dismantling a shifty political rival with ruthless wit and logic.
As soon as he moved to Illinois in 1830, Abraham Lincoln found himself on the opposite side of the political fence from Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist preacher and politician.
The mail he received reminds us anew of how little praise he received, and how philosophically he bore abuse.
On March 3, 1865, the day before Abraham Lincoln was to be sworn in for the second time as President, a New York private named William Johnson, just one of the thousands of Federal troops who had voted for their Commander-in-Chief, mailed him a gift, along with a painfully scra
He told President Lincoln that he was better than any other officer on the field at Bull Run, and he got the Army’s top job. He built a beaten force into a proud one, and stole a march on Robert E. Lee with it. He was 24 hours away from winning the Civil War. Then, he fell apart.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The author joins the thousands who feel compelled to trace the flight of Lincoln’s assassin.
The first non-children’s book I ever read was Philip Van Doren Stern’s novel The Man Who Killed Lincoln. How it fell into my hands, I cannot say.
A child of the South's "Lost Cause," Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national government for the first time since Reconstruction. In so doing, he changed the nation forever.
“I think one man is just as good as another,” he said, “as long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” Yet Truman broke with his convictions to make civil rights a concern of the national g
When William Withers, Jr., stepped up to the conductor’s podium at Ford’s Theatre that April evening, he thought that the greatest triumph of his career was just a few minutes away.
April 14, 1865 was an important day for William Withers, Jr. He was the orchestra leader at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and, that evening, he was going to perform his song “Honor to Our Soldiers” for Abraham Lincoln.
Governor Mario Cuomo of New York has used history as a guide and a solace for a good part of his life.
Those who see Governor Mario Cuomo of New York for the first time are likely to be surprised.
At war’s outbreak, a frightened commander was ready to give away the Union’s greatest navy yard.
The calamity was already full blown when Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861. South Carolina had left the Union three months back, and six states had followed her out.
More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.
"Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year.
Before the movie version of Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois opened across the country in 1940, a special White House screening was arranged for Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Sherwood was then acting as speechwriter.
Clues uncovered during the recent restoration of his house at Springfield help humanize the Lincoln portrait.
One good measure of our apparently inexhaustible interest in Abraham Lincoln is that this year eight hundred thousand of us will be led through his house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield, Illinois.
Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then, the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But, after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.
In the crowded months between the beginning of the 1860 presidential campaign and the attack on Fort Sumter, it is easy now to see the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as something preordained, as though the issues had manufactured a figure commensurate with their importance.
In the republic’s direst hour, he took command. In the black days after Bull Run, he won West Virginia for the Union. He raised a magnificent army and led it forth to meet his “cautious & weak” opponent, Robert E. Lee. Why hasn’t history been kinder to George B. McClellan?
General George B. McClellan possessed a particular talent for dramatic gesture, and on the afternoon of September 14, 1862, at South Mountain in western Maryland, he surpassed himself.
A new novel about Lincoln examines questions about civil liberties in wartime, staff loyalties and disloyalties, and especially, Lincoln’s priorities
This interview took place at the end of May in William Safire’s office at the Washington bureau of The New York Times. Safire is a trim and affable man of fifty-seven.
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly.
The framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done but might be astonished that their words still carry so much weight. A distinguished scholar tells us how the great charter has survived and flourished.
The curiously troubled origin of a brief and fitting inscription
On February 9, 1911, Congress approved a bill authorizing construction of a monument to Abraham Lincoln in the nation’s capital. The notion of building such a memorial had long moved many people for varied reasons.
A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape, with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts.
The only one of our presidents who retired to Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style.
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
A distinguished journalist and former presidential adviser says that, to find the meaning of any news story, we must dig for its roots in the past.
I am fascinated by what I see in the rearview mirror of experience. The future, being a mystery, excites, but the past instructs.
Vidal’s Lincoln
WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885, Lincoln’s old friend and law partner William H.
MATTERS OF FACT
“ASSASSINATION IS NOT an American practice or habit,” wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward on July 15, 1864, “and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.
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