Lincoln in Private

December 1, 2020

To write King Richard, a chronicle of the Watergate conspiracy, veteran Washington Post reporter Dobbs (One Minute to Midnight) drew on thousands of hours of newly released taped recordings. New York Times best-selling author of The Secret Game, Ellsworth heads back to his hometown in The Ground Breaking to report on the reopened investigation into the Tulsa Race Massacre and reckon with its consequences. Guinn's War on the Border recounts Pancho Villa's blood-soaked raid on a small U.S. border town and Gen. John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition, a retaliatory gesture (75,000-copy first printing). From Schulman, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the College of Staten Island and codirector of the ACT UP Oral History Project, Let the Record Show is a two-decades-in-the-making history of ACT UP's AIDSs advocacy. New York Times best-selling author White examines the 16th president's personal notes and jottings to show us Lincoln in Private.

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April 15, 2021
White (American Ulysses, 2016) takes a new approach to Lincoln biography. White explores the 100-plus personal notes that Lincoln wrote and then hid away in desk drawers both in his Springfield home and office and in the White House. Many of these are mere fragments, often just truncated words on torn-off scraps of paper. But they do add a unique perspective on the evolution of thought in America's greatest President, revealing seeds that later blossomed into his personal and political inspiration. Some are reflective, like a rumination on his 1848 vacation at Niagara Falls, where the cataracts' sublime beauty made him wonder where all that water came from. As a practicing country lawyer, Lincoln acknowledged that the public held lawyers in general to be dishonest, and determined to advance his own character through integrity, truthfulness, and courage. Other notes reveal his complex relations with the nascent Republican Party. And in Lincoln's note meditating on the Divine Will, White finds language that prefigured Lincoln's celebrated Second Inaugural Address. The book concludes with complete annotated texts of these 109 notes and a bibliography. Students of Lincoln will find a deep background disclosing the personal thoughts that generated great national actions.

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May 1, 2021
A collection and analysis of Lincoln's notes to himself. Lincoln's immortal words would barely fill a chapter, and he didn't keep a diary. However, throughout his life, he scribbled innumerable notes and even modest essays. Meant for his own eyes, these rarely saw the light, but he kept them. Historians find them a source of insight into his thoughts, and they regularly appear in scholarly collections of his writings. "The point of many of Lincoln's notes to himself was not to rehearse language and ideas for subsequent speeches," writes historian and Lincoln scholar White. "Instead, they served as a private pressure valve so that he could better use his persuasive combination of calm logic and humor." Biographies and popular histories quote liberally from the president's writings, and this book is no exception. Wide-ranging, they are a mixed bag and include a poetic musing on his first sight of Niagara Falls; a dense, 10-page discussion of the pros and cons of the protective tariff; speech fragments; and innumerable scraps, ranging from a few sentence to long lists and charts regarding presidential appointments and campaign strategy. Occasionally, readers will encounter writing of genuine historical value, such as a public statement Lincoln proposed to release if defeated in the 1864 election or arguments pointing out the irrationality of slavery. These fragments appear in the appendix, and readers who turn to them first will realize that, while Lincoln may be immortal, most of what he put on paper is not. Many will feel grateful to biographers, who read everything that great men and women wrote so that we don't have to. Fortunately, White is a formidable scholar, one of the leading authorities on Lincoln and his milieu. He devotes most of the text to summarizing the work and explaining what Lincoln was thinking and doing at the time. A fine interpretation of Lincoln ephemera.

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