Last Updated: September 27, 2024
Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation
by Edward Robert McClelland
An impassioned and timely exploration of Abraham Lincoln’s long-time rivalry–and eventual alliance–with Stephen Douglas. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas are a misunderstood duo. History remembers them as antagonists, and for most of the years the two men knew each other, they were. In 1860, they both ran for president. Lincoln and Douglas ended as allies, though, against the greatest threat–slavery–that our country has ever faced.
At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes–mostly working-class Americans in their twenties–became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.
Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism
by Stephen Breyer
An analysis by recently retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer that deconstructs the textualist philosophy of the current Supreme Court’s supermajority and makes the case for a better way to interpret the Constitution.
An account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter–a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were ‘so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.’ Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story.
Throne of Grace: A Mountain Man, an Epic Adventure, and the Bloody Conquest of the American West
by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
It is the early 19th century, and the land recently purchased by President Thomas Jefferson stretches west for thousands of miles. Thus was the birth of Manifest Destiny and the resulting bloody battles with Indigenous tribes encountered by white explorers. Also in this volatile mix are the grizzled fur trappers and mountain men, waging war against the Native American tribes whose lands they traverse. This is the setting of Throne of Grace, and the guide to this epic narrative is arguably America’s greatest yet most unsung pathfinder, Jedediah Smith.