The Lincoln Enigma

In The Lincoln Enigma, the editor, Gabor Boritt, has gathered a group of talented historians to examine the life and legacy of America's most remarkable president. Virtually all of the contributors to this volume have written important books that have advanced our understanding of Lincoln. The result is an engaging collection of lucid essays that provides an excellent introduction to Lincoln scholarship for the general reader. Many of the topics explored here cover familiar territory, including Lincoln's ideas about the Constitution, his boyhood, marriage, and Civil War military leadership. Some of these scholars, who have written extensively on Lincoln, struggle with the challenge of saying something new about this familiar figure. Several of the essays, such as Jean Baker's on Lincoln's marriage and David Donald's on Lincoln as a military leader, retrace themes explored in earlier work. Other writers, such as Douglas Wilson, who explores Lincoln's youthful sense of emotional vulnerability, manage to say something new by pushing the interpretive envelope. Unfortunately, Wilson's work founders on a lack of hard evidence. Similarly, Boritt's provocative essay on Lincoln and colonization makes a distinctive contribution that is less than convincing. Boritt believes that Lincoln's support for the colonization of African Americans was a savvy political gambit designed to build support for emancipation. If true, such an interpretation could support the view that Lincoln held surprisingly egalitarian racial views and would refute the findings of the popular writer Lerone Bennett Jr., who has portrayed Lincoln's views on race in highly critical terms. Unfortunately, Boritt's work is grounded mostly on psychological speculation and wishful thinking

Art history · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Trilogy · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law