Unpublished Appendices to Bruce Lincoln, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder (Oxford University Press, 2023 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Teoria Polityki, 2020
My aim here is to extend and further explore the deeper meaning of a phrase I coined some years ago: "deadly hermeneutics" (Ball, 1987): 2 roughly, the idea that hermeneutics-the art of textual interpretation-can be, and often is, a deadly business, inasmuch as peoples' lives, liberties and well-being hang in the balance. I plan to proceed as follows. By way of introduction and illustration I first consider very briefly three modern examples of deadly hermeneutics. I then go on to provide a brief account of the hermeneutical-political situation in which Abraham Lincoln found himself in the 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War and subsequently during the war itself. This requires that I sketch an overview of the Southern case for secession and, more particularly, their interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to legitimize that radical move. I then attempt to show how Lincoln invoked and used a counter-interpretation of the Declaration in his speeches on the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Dred Scott decision (1857), and his debates with Senator Stephen A. Douglas (1858). I next look at President Lincoln's interpretation of the Constitution in the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), his suspension of Habeas Corpus and, finally, his finest, briefest-and at the time highly controversial-Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln, Colonization, and Evidentiary Standards: A response to Allen C. Guelzo
"In the Winter 2013 issue of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, historian Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College took vigorous exception to my scholarship on Abraham Lincoln’s involvement with the colonization movement, including two prior articles I have written for the same journal and my 2011 book, co-authored with Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement. Colonization is an admittedly controversial subject matter owing to its racially charged legacy, and one that frequently generates discussion where Abraham Lincoln is involved. As a frequent contributor to that discussion, I have also invited open scrutiny of my work and historical interpretations including by sharing an extensive collection of original source material on this website. Many historians have since contributed a number of constructive insights to the ongoing colonization dialogue in the time since I first published my initial findings on this subject. Unfortunately Professor Guelzo’s recent commentary in the JALA offers little new to the discussion while heaping much scorn in the direction of my work. As a number of Guelzo’s charges cross the boundaries of professional and scholarly behavior, turning instead to personal insinuations of intentional scholarly transgression in the aforementioned volume of research, I felt it necessary – along with Sebastian Page – to offer a written response."
Lincoln's Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America's Greatest President
Civil War Book Review, 2016
Lincoln's death produced perhaps the saddest days in American history. The fact that Lincoln's assassination came just days after the end of a nearly four-year Civil War added a level of emotional anguish unprecedented in American history. Writing in brisk, crisp sentences and using short chapters, Kathryn Canavan tells the tale of the end of Lincoln's life in a refreshingly conversational style, one that matches the matter-of-fact nature of her topic. Lincoln's Final Hours is a marvelous book filled with one memorable and astonishing fact and detail after another.
Oral History Review, 2007
This article narrates the role of oral testimony in the field of Abraham Lincoln studies from 1865 through the 1930s. Collected in the form of letters, affidavits, and face-to-face interviews, this mounting body of "eyewitness evidence" dominated the discourse for two generations and reflective, public practice culminated in the organization of a "Lincoln Inquiry" in the Midwest during the 1920s and 1930s. For a time, practitioners successfully defended themselves against increasing positivist assaults on the credibility of oral testimony. Their interests and efforts resonate with later oral history practice and theory about method, authorship, performance, and memory, and their story highlights the contingency inherent in the development of oral historical practice in America.
The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon
The Journal of American History, 2002
Nearly a century and a half after his death, Abraham Lincoln remains an intrinsic part of the American consciousness, yet his intentions as president and his personal character continue to stir debate. Now, in The Lincoln Enigma, Gabor Boritt invites renowned Lincoln scholars, and rising new voices, to take a look at much-debated aspects of Lincoln's life, including his possible gay relationships, his plan to send blacks back to Africa, and his high-handed treatment of the Constitution. Boritt explores Lincoln's proposals that looked to a lily-white America. Jean Baker marvels at Lincoln's loves and marriage. David Herbert Donald highlights the similarities and differences of the Union and Confederate presidents' roles as commanders-inchief. Douglas Wilson shows us the young Lincoln-not the strong leader of popular history, but a young man who questions his own identity and struggles to find his purpose. Gerald Prokopowicz searches for the military leader, William C. Harris for the peacemaker, and Robert Bruce meditates on Lincoln and death. In a final chapter Boritt and Harold Holzer offer a fascinating portfolio of Lincoln images in modern art. Acute and thought-provoking in their observations, this all-star cast of historians-including two Pulitzer and three Lincoln Prize winners-questions our assumptions of Lincoln, and provides a new vitality to our ongoing reflections on his life and legacy.
Civil War Obscura: Lincoln On The Eve Of \u2761
2018
A Journalist\u27s View of Lincoln For those of us who enjoy searching for, and reading, out-of-print books about the Civil War era, look no further. This column, Civil War Obscura, focuses on popular, but lesser known books of the period. No printed text is off limits; fiction, non-fiction, personal ...
Abraham Lincoln: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay
2007
In this slim collection a distinguished editor and biographer presents eleven brief excerpts from the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History, by his devoted secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay. The introduction, Nicolay and Hay: Court Historians, appeared in the Winter 1998 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Readers of that masterful summary may have no need of this book. Burlingame displays his usual sensitivity to male relationships, comparing the affection between Lincoln and Hay to that between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, though he errs in making Hay, an Ivy League snob, nineteen years younger than his boss; he was actually the junior by twenty-nine years. Non-specialists are apt to be misled by much of the content of the fewer than 65 pages Burlingame has cherry picked from the mammoth biography. Partly serialized in the Century Magazine, 1886-1890, and published as books in the latter year, few today, even among Lincoln specialists, have read the entire 4,709 pages. Scholarly assessments changed almost completely from the late 1880s, when James Ford Rhodes praised it, to 1939 when Allan Nevins condemned it. Burlingame argues that Carl Sandburg could not have begun his own life without it. Other biographers had to rely on it until the opening of the Lincoln papers in 1947, followed two years later by the publication of Hay's diary and Nicolay's memos of presidential conversations. Now, except for hardcore Lincoln idolaters, including the current clique of court historians, most readers will find even the brief excerpts from this panegyric hard to stomach. The contrast between Burlingame's scholarship and Nicolay and Hay's hagiography is often jarring.