The Civil War Podcast

The Washington Post has offered a comparison of Lincoln’s speeches with Trump’s. It’s depressing reading – as one commenter puts it, “We’re comparing apples and feces, here.” – but maybe skip the Trump parts and revel in the beautiful humanity of Lincoln’s words. I particularly liked this quote about immigrants. As a Canadian living in […]

As with a few of their other holdings, the Lincoln Presidential Library’s new Bible acquisition is of dubious connection to the man. He may have thumbed through it once or two, but an eighteen pound Bible is not really a book that lends itself to light reading. (Pun intended. Also, eighteen pounds?!) A Bible given […]

The WaPo looks at the discussions (and arguments) that marked the Lincoln Memorial planning. We forget that the now beloved monument was once an edgy and divisive design. Included in this article are some of the designs that were rejected. It’s interesting to wonder if they’d have been accepted as the Greek temple eventually was. […]

I gave up on fiction a few years ago, but I’m curious about this new book. Lincoln’s live-in friendship with Joshua Speed is a topic I find endearing, and a great novelist can often make fiction feel like real history. (See also: Gore Vidal’s Lincoln.) Abraham Lincoln is irresistible to writers. Historians have delved into […]

I was on the fence about this link, as the article it leads to is rife with ads, and won’t let anyone with an adblocker access it before the adblocker is disabled. But it’s beautifully designed, and I like that the newspaper is making use of its archives to give citizens a glimpse of their […]

I did a cursory search a few years ago when I heard Karl Marx had authored… something on the US Civil War. A book? Essays? Opinions? I wasn’t able to unearth the results on Archive.org. But it seems from this article that he also wrote letters – this not-particularly-stirring one was sent to Lincoln, to […]

The modern conclusions drawn here are very questionable, but the Civil War history was pretty edifying: I knew that Lincoln had pushed through the statehood for a couple of states, but the political impact had never been fully clear until reading this. This largely forgotten act of line-drawing enabled one of the most consequential gerrymanders […]

Happy 2019! On this anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Washington Post offers some musings on Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and how his words can be applied to our lives and actions for the new year. Source: The perfect New Year’s resolution for 2019 was written 154 years ago – The Washington Post

The Washington Post offers an opinion piece on how Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment severs the modern GOP’s connection to “The Party of Lincoln”. Republicans intended for the birthright citizenship provision to ensure that African Americans’ citizenship rights could not be abridged by racist Southerners. It was meant to protect the rights of former […]

Kudos to Andrea Simakis for providing this very extensive recounting of a recent talk by two unusual Lincoln biographers: The Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, and the hipster historian Sarah Vowell, author of the hilarious and weird, Assassination Vacation. I’m hoping to find some video from this event, but if that fails at least I have […]