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. [1] [2] Burlingame has written or edited twenty books about Lincoln. [3]
Burlingame was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1960. [4] He studied at Princeton University (BA 1964) where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He received a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1971.
Burlingame was a member of the history department at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, from 1968 and until 2001. [5] He joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Springfield in 2009.
Burlingame is a renowned scholar on the life of Abraham Lincoln. He authored The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994) and the two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008). The former was said to have launched a new "'golden age' of Lincoln scholarship." [6] The latter won the 2010 Lincoln Prize, was a co-winner of the annual book prize awarded by the Abraham Lincoln Institute, and won the Russell P. Strange Book Award given annually by the Illinois State Historical Society for the best book on Illinois history. Burlingame has edited over a dozen volumes of Lincoln primary source materials.
Burlingame is a board member and officer of both the Abraham Lincoln Association and Abraham Lincoln Institute. In addition to his awards for Abraham Lincoln: A Life, he has received the Abraham Lincoln Association Book Prize (1996), the Lincoln Diploma of Honor from Lincoln Memorial University (1998), Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College (2001), and was inducted as a laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the state's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in 2009 as a Bicentennial Laureate. [7]
Burlingame has charged several Lincoln scholars with plagiarism. In 2000, Burlingame submitted a review to The Journal of American History alleging plagiarism in John C. Waugh's book, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency. In the same review, Burlingame also highlighted errors in citation and transcription in Harold Holzer's book, The Lincoln Mailbag: America Writes to the President, 1861-1896. Holzer responded by charging that Burlingame had "riven the Lincoln field, and made it unpleasant to contribute scholarship. He's the Torquemada of academic journalism." [8] In 1993, and again in 2002, Burlingame was involved in the Stephen B. Oates controversy, maintaining Oates plagiarized in his Lincoln biography, With Malice Toward None. [9] [10]
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.
Robert Todd Lincoln was an American lawyer and businessman. The eldest son of President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, he was the only one of their four children to survive past the teenage years and also the only to outlive both parents. Robert Lincoln became a business lawyer and company president, and served as both United States Secretary of War (1881–1885) and the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain (1889–1893).
Paul Martin Simon was an American author and politician from Illinois. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1985 and in the United States Senate from 1985 to 1997. A member of the Democratic Party, he unsuccessfully ran for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
The University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) is a public university in Springfield, Illinois. The university was established by the Illinois General Assembly in 1969 as Sangamon State University with a focus on post-graduate education. It became the third member of the University of Illinois system on July 1, 1995. The university now also includes a liberal arts college and is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. UIS is also a member of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the American Council on Education. The campus' main repository, Brookens Library, holds a collection of nearly 800,000 books and serials in addition to accessible resources at the University of Illinois Chicago and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campuses.
John George Nicolay was a German-born American author and diplomat who served as private secretary to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and later co-authored Abraham Lincoln: A History, a ten-volume biography of the 16th president. He was a member of the German branch of the Nicolay family.
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.
William Hervey Lamme Wallace, more commonly known as W. H. L. Wallace, was a lawyer and a Union general in the American Civil War, considered by Ulysses S. Grant to be one of the Union's greatest generals.
Stephen Baery Oates was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He specialized in the American Civil War era and authored numerous books.
Thomas "Tad" Lincoln was the fourth and youngest son of the 16th President of the United States Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring farm, south of Hodgenville in Hardin County, Kentucky. His siblings were Sarah Lincoln Grigsby and Thomas Lincoln, Jr. After a land title dispute forced the family to leave in 1811, they relocated to Knob Creek farm, eight miles to the north. By 1814, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, had lost most of his land in Kentucky in legal disputes over land titles. In 1816, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, their nine-year-old daughter Sarah, and seven-year-old Abraham moved to what became Indiana, where they settled in Hurricane Township, Perry County, Indiana.
Richard John Carwardine is a Welsh historian and academic. He specialises in American politics and religion in the era of the American Civil War.
Edward Baker Lincoln was the second son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. He was named after Lincoln's close friend, Edward Dickinson Baker. Both Abraham and Mary spelled his name "Eddy"; however, the National Park Service uses "Eddie" as a nickname and the nickname also appears spelled this way on his crypt at the Lincoln tomb.
The Mississippi River campaigns, within the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War, were a series of military actions by the Union Army during which Union troops, helped by Union Navy gunboats and river ironclads, took control of the Cumberland River, the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River, a main north-south avenue of transport.
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.
William Slade was the White House usher, which at the time was "one of the highest posts available to a black Washingtonian"; he acted as valet, confidential messenger, doorkeeper, and majordomo to Abraham Lincoln, and remained in charge of the White House after Lincoln died.
Ozias Mather Hatch was an American politician. He was the 13th Illinois Secretary of State, serving under William Henry Bissell, John Wood, and Richard Yates Sr. During the governorship of Wood, Hatch handled most of the duties of Governor of Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln: A History is an 1890 ten-volume account of the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, written by John Nicolay and John Hay, who were his personal secretaries during the American Civil War.
Benjamin Platt Thomas was an American historian and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. In 1952 he published a best-selling one volume biography on Lincoln entitled Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. Thomas killed himself on November 29, 1956.
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.
The presidential transition of Abraham Lincoln began when he won the United States 1860 United States presidential election, becoming the president-elect of the United States, and ended when Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861.