Stephen B. Oates

Stephen B. Oates is the author of sixteen books, including With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln and Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., both recipients of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award and Christopher Award. Other notable works include The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820-1861.

Oates was featured in Ken Burns's The Civil War series on PBS and received the Nevins-Freeman Award of the Chicago Civil War Round Table for lifetime achievement in the field of Civil War studies. A former Guggenheim fellow, he holds a B.A., M.A., and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Oates is also a professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Articles by this Author

Lincoln's Corrupt War Department, February/March 2021 | Vol. 66, No. 2

Lincoln's first Secretary of War amassed a fortune at the start of the Civil War, forcing a congressional investigation.

The Week The World Watched Selma, June/july 1982 | Vol. 33, No. 4

A century after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern blacks still were denied the vote. In 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr, set out to change that—by marching through the heart of Alabama.

The Slaves Freed, December 1980 | Vol. 32, No. 1

PRESIDENT LINCOLN MOVES AT LAST Influence of “Advanced Republicans” Seen as Crucial to the Outcome THE UNION UNITED STILL THE PRESIDENT’S TACT & COURAGE HE WAITED ON THE PROPER HOUR JUBILATION AMONG THE BLACKS They Stand Ready to Defend With Arms the Rights Thus Gained NEW LIGHT SHED ON THE PARTICULARS OF THE GREAT DRAMA

Children Of Darkness, October 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 6

Sure that he was divinely appointed, Nat Turner led fellow slaves in a bloody attempt to overthrow their masters

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.