Abraham Lincoln was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defending the nation as a constitutional union, defeating the insurgent Confederacy, playing a major role in the abolition of slavery, expanding the power of the federal government, and modernizing the U.S. economy.
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.
The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the afternoon of November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated Confederate forces in the Battle of Gettysburg, the Civil War's deadliest battle. The speech is widely considered one of the most notable and famous delivered in American history.
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history and Southern United States history that followed the American Civil War and was dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant citizenship and equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. To circumvent these legal achievements, the former Confederate states imposed poll taxes and literacy tests and engaged in terrorism to intimidate and control people of color and to discourage or prevent them from voting.
David Herbert Donald was an American historian, best known for his 1995 biography of Abraham Lincoln. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for earlier works; he published more than 30 books on United States political and literary figures and the history of the American South.
Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks, such as the Give Me Liberty series for high school classrooms. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Foner is the first to associate the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with section three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, even though concentrated in only the Southern United States, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
Neoabolitionist is a term used in historiography to characterize historians of race relations motivated by the spirit of racial equality typified by the abolitionists who fought to abolish slavery in the mid-19th century. They write especially about African-American history, slavery in the United States, the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.
Gabor S. Boritt is an American historian. He was the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born and raised in Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union before escaping to America, where he received his higher education and became a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 16 books about Lincoln or the War. Boritt received the National Humanities Medal in 2008 from President George W. Bush.
Brooks Donohue Simpson is an American historian and an ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, specializing in American political and military history, especially the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras and the American presidency.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
The Civil War Institute (CWI) at Gettysburg College is a non-profit organization (due to being a part of Gettysburg College and is not a separate legal entity) created to promote the study of the American Civil War Era. The CWI was founded in 1982 by historian and Gettysburg College professor Gabor Boritt, an Abraham Lincoln and American Civil War scholar. The current director is Peter S. Carmichael. The Institute helps coordinate a number of Civil War-related events for the public, including the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, an annual program designed to commemorate Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as well as a week-long summer conference that hosts 400 participants annually. The CWI also supports student learning at Gettysburg College, offering several programs throughout the year to help students hone their skills as young historians.
Harold Holzer is a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era. He serves as director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Holzer previously spent twenty-three years as senior vice president for external affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before retiring in 2015.
This bibliography of Abraham Lincoln is a comprehensive list of written and published works about or by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. In terms of primary sources containing Lincoln's letters and writings, scholars rely on The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler, and others. It only includes writings by Lincoln, and omits incoming correspondence. In the six decades since Basler completed his work, some new documents written by Lincoln have been discovered. Previously, a project was underway at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln to provide "a freely accessible comprehensive electronic edition of documents written by and to Abraham Lincoln". The Papers of Abraham Lincoln completed Series I of their project The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln in 2000. They electronically launched The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, Second Edition in 2009, and published a selective print edition of this series. Attempts are still being made to transcribe documents for Series II and Series III.
The Frémont Emancipation was part of a military proclamation issued by Major General John C. Frémont (1813–1890) on August 30, 1861, in St. Louis, Missouri during the early months of the American Civil War. The proclamation placed the state of Missouri under martial law and decreed that all property of those bearing arms in rebellion would be confiscated, including slaves, and that confiscated slaves would subsequently be declared free. It also imposed capital punishment for those in rebellion against the federal government.
Michael A. Burlingame is an American historian noted for his works on Abraham Lincoln. He is the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. Burlingame has written or edited twenty books about Lincoln.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery is a historical non-fiction book written by American historian Eric Foner. Published in 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company, the book serves as a biographical portrait of United States President Abraham Lincoln, discussing the evolution of his stance on slavery in the United States over the course of his life. The Fiery Trial, which derives its title from Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress of December 1, 1862, was the 22nd book written by Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. It was praised by critics and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize.
The following is a list of the published works of James M. McPherson, an American Civil War historian.
This article documents the political career of Abraham Lincoln from the end of his term in the United States House of Representatives in March 1849 to the beginning of his first term as President of the United States in March 1861.
