The Global Lincoln

The bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009 generated a number of well-organized conferences and thoughtful essay collections, but this volume stands out as one of the most eye-opening for American historians. It is refreshing to focus on Lincoln's role as a global figure and to dissect ways that various nations have engaged his legacy. The Global Lincoln makes clear that despite previous and mostly anecdotal efforts to acknowledge Lincoln's international stature, significantly more scholarship is left to be done to understand his impact abroad. The revelations begin early in this collection as the book's editors, Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, demolish the oft-repeated tale about how a tribal chieftain deep in the Caucasus once asked the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy to chronicle the life of Abraham Lincoln, whom he apparently referred to as “the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world,” with a “voice like thunder” and “deeds ... as strong as the rock” (p. 6). This is a wonderful story made popular over the years by writers such as Carl Sandburg and Doris Kearns Goodwin, but which almost certainly is untrue. Tolstoy never described his encounter with Lincoln in his own writings. The tale emerged secondhand in a dubious 1909 recollection that the historians Norman Saul and Thomas Schwartz deconstructed at a July 2009 conference, “The Global Lincoln,” which formed the foundation for this volume

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