Lincoln Books

From front jacket:

"The history of a mountain is a curiosity, not quite like the history of county or a town. We are accustomed to think of history in terms of people and events, and of features of a landscape only as a barrier to their progress, or as incentives for their exploits. A mountain has no political or cultural identity. It has done nothing, but has only sat there and been acted upon.

But Mount Tamalpais is so dear to so many people, and has been for so many generations, that it has acquired something like a personality. It has its dark and its sunny moods; it can be dangerous. It has inspired ambition and greed, as well as the most selfless idealism. It has endured grievous injuries, and has scars to show for them. Whether or not one thinks of the Sleeping Maiden legend, one feels the power and the force of the Mountain, the strength and beauty of its profile, the warmth and familiarity of its massive forms. It seems alive. One has a relationship with it, whether a slight acquaintance or a deep, abiding friendship. At its best, to use a word now rampant among us, it is awesome.

For the first time, this book brings together the people, the events, and the issues that have made Mount Tamalpais what it is today; wildlife refuge, park, watershed, national monument, recreational and spiritual focus for many thousands of people. From grizzly bear hunts to battles over conservation, from Coast Miwoks to hippies, from poetry and painting to rock and roll festivals, this history tells us about one of the most striking and beloved landmarks in the United States, the destination of some three million visitors each year."

At first, I was doubtful. After all, how funny could
a columnist from 1900 be?

I was wrong! This book had social and personal
commentary that goes for today.
My favorites were the marriage articles
.

Part 1 of Bruce Catton's fantastic trilogy on the Civil War is a great way to start learning about one of the most interesting conflicts in American history. While recent accounts offer more and have gone into a better analysis using modern historical tools this still remains one of the most interesting looks at classical history. This book really focuses on the relationship of McClellan to the soldiers and does a decent job using historical documents to make his point. While there are many rich documents out there and the status of McClellan has changed since this book was written it is still an interesting account of the time.

Originally published in 1946, this is a terrific presentation of Civil War photos by the Matthew Brady team. Of special interest is the section reproducing Brady's post-war lantern slide lecture book, with unedited captions, for a program that was to have been presented at Carnegie Hall.

Roy Meredith's text covers Brady's pre-war career, with a large sampling of his portraits - including Lincoln - then takes up a chronological account, mostly of the Eastern Theater, as Brady & his team followed the armies in a wagon, processing their plates under terrible conditions. A large amount of photographs must have been ruined in the rain & mud. Brady mostly points his camera at the terrible aftermath of battle, at bodies & broken barricades, but there is one rare photo that may have been shot during Antietam. Brady is present at an out door gathering of Grant and his generals (Brady calls it a "War Council," but Grant never put his plans up for a vote. We see a defeated Lee, his great dignity intact. The Grand Review marches past. The Lincoln conspirators are hanged. Then we meet an arrogant Custer; a delegation of Native American chiefs; the curvaceous dancer, Laura Le Claire; Andrew Carnegie and finally, President Grant.

There are many books available of Civil War photographs. This one is excellent because it focuses on Brady. It's a large book - over 300 pages & 300 photos. Dover publishes fine books at bargain prices.

Bob Rixon

Mr. Lincoln's City: An Illustrated Guide To The Civil War Sites Of Washington by U.S. Army Major General Richard M. Lee (Retired) is enhanced with 15 maps and 130 historical photographs as it offers the reader a series of major tours throughout downtown Washington, DC, to 80 sites that were significant to the events occurring between 1861 and 1865 during the American Civil War. There were a total of 68 forts encircling Washington, which the Union forces utilized as a major war base with its rail net and staging areas. This proved critically important as Confederate forces approached the city when the great battles took place in neighboring Virginia to the detriment of the Union Army. Here land marked for the onsite visitor as well as the armchair traveler are the Washington Monument slaughterhouse, the fetid creeks and canals, the sick, the wounded and the dying lying in hospitals strewn across the city. This is also the place where President Lincoln brought his forces to final victory, preserved the union, and resulted in Washington becoming the premier city of a reunited republic -- an unassailable position it has held down to the present day. Mr. Lincoln's City is an enthusiastically recommended addition to American History and Civil War History reference collections, as well as an ideal resource for planning a Civil War oriented tour of Washington, DC.

This is an entertaining, thought provoking course that will teach you about Lincoln's life and effect he had on American history, politics and society.

The description of the course is as follows (provided because Amazon has not listed it):

Five days after Abraham Lincoln was buried in Springfield, Illinois, John Locke Scripps, who had convinced Lincoln to write his first campaign autobiography, wrote: "In certain showy, and what is said to be, most desirable endowments, how many Americans have surpassed him! Yet how he looms above them now!"

The nation's 16th president, Scripps asserted, had become "the Great American Man--the grand central figure in American (perhaps the World's) History."

Historians still find it hard to quibble with Scripps's opinion of Lincoln's place in the story of America. Lincoln was the central figure in the nation's greatest crisis, the Civil War. His achievements in office make as good a case as any that he was the greatest president in U.S. history.

What made Lincoln great? What was it about him that struck those who knew him? This course explores those questions with the help of an authority who, in his own words, has "spent many years trying to get to know this man from afar," and in doing so has become one of the country's most distinguished Lincoln scholars and an award-winning author for his books about Lincoln.

Professor Allen C. Guelzo will lead you on "a great adventure," a tour of Lincoln's life, from his forebears' arrival in America through an evaluation of how his legacy lives on for us today. You will come to know Lincoln through the eyes of those who knew, lived with, and worked with him.

For Lincoln buffs and those simply wishing to know him much better, this course opens a compelling view into his thinking and career.

In addition to asking what it was like to know Lincoln, Professor Guelzo explores three themes:

What ideas were at the core of his understanding of American politics?
Why did he oppose slavery, and what propelled him, in the 1850s, into the open opposition to slavery that led to his election to the presidency in 1860?
What particular gifts equipped Lincoln to lead the nation through the "fiery trial" of the Civil War?
Lincoln as Man and President

"Just think of such a sucker as me as President."

--Abraham Lincoln, commenting to a newspaper editor on his presidential chances

With Professor Guelzo, you will explore Lincoln's pre-presidential life for clues to his most significant personality traits. You will find a man who possessed perhaps the most complex inner life of any American public figure. You will meet a Lincoln who:

Was an unusual combination of both introvert and extrovert.
Never joined a church, professed no formal religion, and was even known to have been critical of Christianity before he entered politics. Yet he may have been more moral, ethical, and "Christian" than any other U.S. president.
Held a profoundly fatalistic view of life, rooted in the Calvinist teaching of his youth, that human will was essentially nothing, and everything was predestined by an immensely powerful God.
However, Lincoln was anything but passive in life. Largely self-taught, he was a quietly confident man who, regardless of the task--learning to be a surveyor, a lawyer, or President of the United States--"went at it with good earnest."

This aspect of the course will enable you to connect Lincoln the man with Lincoln the president. How was it that someone with limited prior political experience and no administrative background, who was considered homely, unsophisticated, and self-deprecating, could have achieved such monumental success as the nation's chief executive?

In fact, as you will see, "folksy" Abraham Lincoln was about nothing if not ambition: his own personal burning ambition ("a little engine that knew no rest," his law partner described it) and his firm conviction that the unfettered opportunity to fulfill one's ambitions--"that every man can make himself"--was what made America great.

A House Divided

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free... It will become all one thing, or all the other."

--acceptance speech as 1858 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Illinois

Professor Guelzo does a remarkable job of shedding light on Lincoln's relationship to the issue that defined his presidency and place in history: slavery.

You will trace the circumstances that spurred Lincoln, in the 1850s, to join the Republican Party and take the stand on slavery that won him prominence as a national politician. These events include the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, and Lincoln's famous debates with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

As part of this discussion, Professor Guelzo covers an aspect of Lincoln's opposition to slavery that is not always emphasized: his pro-business, free-market philosophy. As a Whig Party member of the Illinois legislature, Lincoln had favored projects--the creation of a state bank, sale of public lands, transportation improvements--that promoted business and economic development.

In the 1850s, political and economic trends made it clear that slavery, far from slowly dying out as the Founding Fathers had anticipated, was poised to expand to new U.S. states and territories. This alarmed Lincoln, who viewed an expanding supply of inexpensive slave labor as a dire threat to the survival of the free market.

"The Work We Are In"

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan."

--Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

Lincoln transformed himself from an insecure manager into a confident and competent chief executive. "The old man sits here and wields like a backwoods Jupiter the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady and firm," marveled Lincoln's young secretary, John Hay.

You will consider Lincoln's skill in directing not only the war against the Confederacy, but in dealing with difficult members of his own federal government, including General George McClellan, Secretary of State William Seward, and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase--each of whom thought he could run the government better than Lincoln--and Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who tried to issue legal decisions to cripple Lincoln's war effort.

Among the most memorable parts of this course are those in which Professor Guelzo examines Lincoln's nearly unrivaled powers as a writer and communicator. Only Thomas Jefferson spoke and wrote as eloquently and persuasively about American democracy as Lincoln.

The "Great American Man"

"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

--Conclusion to the Gettysburg Address

This course is an absorbing opportunity to increase your knowledge of a man whose words and life embodied the nature of democracy.

Abraham Lincoln understood and envisioned the U.S. as a nation of self-governing equals who were wise enough to be guided not just by self-interest or popular enthusiasm, but by an abiding sense of right and wrong. Ultimately, he gave that nation, in his words, "a new birth of freedom."

Ann Bausum's fascinating narrative is a must for any educator who is currently teaching American Literature or American History in their classroom curriculum. First hand accounts, political cartoons, and photographs of America's greatest investigative journalists brings history alive for any student. Don't skip the forward by Daniel Schorr a legend of investigative journalism in his own right. The resource guide is impressive and Ann's website allows students to search for photographs and information on investigative journalism by accessing the Library of Congress! Bravo Ann! This book is a supplemental must for high school students who may currently be working on their Junior Thesis.

This is a well written book covering many aspects of animal locomotion and cardiac function, from the basic mechanisms of muscle contraction, through the optimum sizes for various athletics, to myocardial contractility and heart failure. The author's range of knowledge appears extraordinary, and many of the discussions of scientific experiments are enlarged by brief descriptions of the scientists themselves. Occasional references to his own work in the various areas further suggests that he has had first hand experience in the several areas of scientific research and clinical practice, as well as personal familiarity with many of the scientists. This is an excellent book for someone wanting to learn either about basic muscle physiology or about the function of muscle in the body. The Introduction indicates that book chapters began as handouts for an undergraduate course, and the book would be an excellent choice as a text for a course in muscle physiology. It is written at the level of college students majoring in Biology, and some familiarity with lower level undergraduate science is required for a full appreciation of the concepts presented, but the writing is sufficiently lucid that a detailed knowledge is not required. The author states that he has attempted to avoid mathematical equations as much as possible, and for the most part, he has kept this promise, although there are some areas where mathematical derivations could not be avoided. In summary, this is an excellent book for anyone wanting to know how muscle works or how it operates in the body

a wonderful book with clear pictures and interesting themes. we especially liked the "noisy" section!

A wonderful book to teach basic concepts such as colors, numbers and opposites. The pictures are bright, clear and engaging. There are some helpful hints in the forward about how to get the most out of reading this (and other books) to you child. My 16 month old son loves this book (as did his older brother when he was a toddler).