Today Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including historians, consider the militant abolitionist John Brown mad. Yet, according to two authors of new books on Lincoln and Brown, their chosen paths eventually seemed to converge.
A self-funding national infrastructure bank modeled on the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would help solve not one but two of the country’s biggest problems.
The Enlightenment and other liberation ideologies had put slavery under fire. “This was the international context of insurgent liberalism that the Confederacy sought to reverse with its bid for a reactionary slaveholders’ republic..
Her originalism ignores the significance of the second American Revolution -- the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Amid national crises, Lincoln and his Republicans remade the Supreme Court to fit their agenda
There was slavery in Illinois for more than 100 years. Even after Illinois entered the Union, loopholes in its laws allowed the practice to continue, making the future Land of Lincoln a quasi-slave state.
Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the Civil War, Eric Foner, the American historian, has also helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.
How does our epoch of political polarization compare to the decade that was rent over the issue of slavery before the Civil War? Historical analogies can be misleading, but the controversies that bedeviled that age still haunt us. In certain ways, they foreshadow our own divided house.
"Donald Trump's greatest threat to our society and to our democracy is not necessarily his authoritarianism, but his essential ignorance—of history, of policy, of political process, of the Constitution. Saying that if Jackson had been around we might not have had the Civil War is like saying that one strong, aggressive leader can shape, prevent, move history however he wishes. This is simply 5th grade understanding of history or worse." David Blight, Yale historian.
Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.
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