Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President

by Brian Lamb (Editor), Susan Swain (Editor)

In a handsome, gift-quality volume celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, America's top Lincoln historians offer their diverse perspectives on the life and legacy of America's sixteenth president. Spanning Lincoln's life—from his early career as a Springfield lawyer, to his presidential reign during one of America's most troubled historical periods, to his assassination in 1865—these essays, developed from original C-SPAN interviews, provide a compelling, composite portrait of Lincoln, one that offers up new stories and fresh insights on a defining leader. Edited by C-SPAN's Brian Lamb and Susan Swain, illustrated with Lamb's photographs of Lincoln landmarks, and promoted throughout the year on C-SPAN, Abraham Lincoln is a wonderful compendium of information and deeply-informed analysis that deserves a prominent place on every bookshelf.

Genres: History, Biography, Civil War, Presidents, Nonfiction, American History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2008

About the author

Brian Lamb, founder of C-SPAN, currently serves as the C-SPAN Networks' Executive Chairman. Since C-SPAN's founding in 1979, Brian has been a regular on-camera presence, interviewing all presidents since Reagan and many world leaders, members of Congress, journalists and authors. Over 15 years beginning in 1989, Brian interviewed 801 nonfiction authors for a weekly series called "Booknotes." Currently, Brian hosts "Q & A," a Sunday evening, hour-long interview program with people who are making things happen in the public sphere.

Six books of collected Brian Lamb interviews have been published by PublicAffairs based on the "Booknotes" and "Q & A" series, most recently, "Sundays at Eight." And in 2010, PublicAffairs published "The Supreme Court," a collection of interviews Brian and C-SPAN colleague Susan Swain conducted with eleven current and former Supreme Court justices. C-SPAN's 10th book with PublicAffairs, "The Presidents: Noted Historians Rank America's Best - and Worst - Chief Executives," was published in spring 2019.

Brian's work with C-SPAN has been recognized with the Presidential Medal of Honor and the National Humanities Medal. In 2011, Purdue University, Brian's alma mater, announced the naming of the Brian Lamb School of Communication.

Brian is a longtime resident of Arlington, Virginia. When he's not devouring newspapers, websites, nonfiction books, or Thai food at his favorite local restaurant, Brian is likely in hot pursuit of the latest country music release.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I attended the 13th annual Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November this year (2008). Brian Lamb was one of the speakers. He was absolutely entertaining. He said he is not a Lincoln nut like the rest of us at the conference. However, who's the one who just published a big Lincoln book?

In addition to Brian Lamb, many of the Great American historians who appear in C-Span's Lincoln book were also at the Lincoln Forum, including Allen Guelzo, Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, Gabor Boritt, Edward Steers, and the inimitable Frank J. Williams.

Some of the chapters in this book are presentations given at previous Lincoln Forums that C-Span broadcast. Overall, I give this book high marks because it includes a wide spectrum of views on Lincoln, including those of two of the most well-known Lincoln detractors. You won't find this array of viewpoints anywhere else. The chapters are conversational in tone, because, of course, they are largely from interviews and other events broadcast by C-Span. If you want a good introduction to the world of Lincoln, including the very best scholars today, this is the book for you.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before you read this book, you should be aware that this is not a book about Abraham Lincoln by historians, not all of whom are great (more on that later), but rather a book collected of excerpts, some of them exceedingly short, from people who are mostly known as writers of books about Abraham Lincoln, many of which I have read and reviewed [1]. To be sure, these people talk about Abraham Lincoln, but mostly as a way of burnishing their own reputation. Rather than being seen as historians, these people should be seen either as salesmen trying to peddle their books to a midbrow audience or as politicians looking for others to believe in their partial and biased perspective of Abraham Lincoln. One is not getting Lincoln direct, for the most part at least, but rather filtered through the research and commercial interests of the various people interviewed by C-Span, and one also gets the sense of how so much political discourse corrupts history as well as our understanding of it.

The contents of this book are varied in size and quality to a remarkable degree. The various excerpts from interviews have been lightly edited (sometimes not nearly enough) and divided into several different categories: Lincoln's road from the log cabin to the White House, Lincoln as a wartime president, Lincoln's character, Lincoln in historical memory, and then Lincoln's words. It is only in this last section that we get to read Lincoln in his own words, as it includes his House Divided speech, a particularly controversial excerpt from the debate in Charleston with Douglas, as well as the Cooper Union address, his First and Second Inaugurals, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and his last address. The size of the excerpts included from various people ranges from short paragraphs for many to sprawling and rambling rants for the worst among them, a "historian" named Lerone Bennet, Jr and an equally ersatz historian, the repugnant Thomas DiLorenzo. Fortunately, most of the historians are far better than these, even if they get far less time to talk about Lincoln. For the most part, everyone here is using Lincoln as a way to burnish their own reputation, rather than appreciating Lincoln for who he was, using Lincoln's biography and writings and speeches as proof texts in some sort of civic religious context rather than in order to better understand him and his time on their own terms.

It is interesting, despite the flaws of this book, to see what these writers think about Lincoln, the sort of causes they wish to enlist Lincoln in, the way they wish to attack a supposed Lincoln cult or say that people are bored by Lincoln and most Lincoln defenders, who apparently have little passion in what they say. The editors of the book appear to have a somewhat cynical aim in that they wish to capitalize on the interest in Lincoln books while also subtly wishing to undermine what it was that Lincoln actually said in the their own self-promotion efforts and those of the historians they select, some of whom made repeat appearances. The book also includes a few very egregious errors that are not corrected in this book's shoddy editing, such as when one historian claims that Chase was a former Whig governor of New York, when that was Seward (81), and that Lincoln sat with photographer Alexander Gardner in February 1865 after having visited Richmond in April 1865 (162). Someone forgot to tell Abraham Lincoln he was a timelord, apparently. This sort of shoddy work shows that the book was a cash grab for everyone involved, from C-Span to the writers included in it. One wonders why they couldn't invite the wonderful political historian Harry Jaffa, given the hacks and no-names included here, even though some of the writers talk about him in absentia. Fortunately, this is a book about a worthwhile enough subject that not even C-Span can ruin it.

[1] See, for example:

http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

My in laws are huge c-span fans. (fact!) so i wasn't entirely surprised when they gave me this volume as a holiday present. Out of respect to their taste, I read the book, and I found it to be alot like CSPAN: not-ready-for-prime-time enthusiasm about the subject and a missionary/monkish pursuit of a diversity of source material.

This book is comprised of television transcripts that have been edited for printing. It's an interesting way to convey a alot of different opinions in a short number of pages, and perhaps this method deserves some histiographical inquiry? Just an idea.

[Len Knighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book on Abraham Lincoln is probably different from the thousands of books written about the 16th President of the United States. There are many authors, and with many authors contributing to the same subject, there is some repetition, but each brings a different perspective to this intriguing and complex man.
If the reader is looking for brilliant writing, he/she should choose TEAM OF RIVALS by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a book I highly recommend. The material in this book was for performance, not publication. The essays come from lectures, interviews, and other oral presentations from the C-Span archives, edited brilliantly by Susan Swain, co-president of the network.
While most of the essays give positive opinions of Lincoln, there are some dissenting opinions. One that stands out is from Thomas DiLorenzo, who believed that Lincoln could have negotiated a treaty that would have avoided a civil war. After reading the book in its entirety, I have come to the conclusion that DiLorenzo did not read the essays of the historians, see the programs on C-Span featuring same, or read Lincoln's speeches. If he had, he would have realized that the issue of slavery created such a chasm between the North and South that peaceful co-existence between these sections (countries) would have been impossible.
Another point DiLorenzo makes is that the South “believed in the old Jeffersonian dictum that the Union was voluntary.”
In a sense this is correct, but not without obligation. Representatives from all thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence, admittedly volunteering to be part of the new nation that was splitting away from England. However, when all thirteen colonies, now states in 1787, signed and ratified the Constitution, they entered into a contract with each other, a contract that did not give them the freedom to choose which laws to obey or not obey. While slavery was not illegal in the first 76 years of the Republic, the issues of expansion and jurisdiction made the Union "a house divided," one that could not stand.
The opinions of the historians are important, but what certainly adds to the quality of the book are Lincoln's most important speeches. One that may not be familiar to most Americans is the Cooper Union Address, delivered at the Cooper Institute in New York on February 27, 1860, and sponsored by the Young Men's Republican Union. While the speeches of the Lincoln-Douglas debates are better known, this speech certainly showed many of the Republican Party that Lincoln was a serious candidate for President. Don't skip it if you have never heard of it before reading this review. It is well worth the time.

As I was nearing the completion of this book, the United States, under the leadership of President Joe Biden, was withdrawing its troops and personnel from Afghanistan. This war has lasted twenty years without a conclusion such as was seen in April 1865 or in the two World Wars of the 20th Century. Mario Cuomo said on C-Span in 2004,
"[If Lincoln were president today,] he would say, 'First of all, don't call it the 'War on terrorism.' You called it that because it allowed you to run up the flag and allowed you to take a vote in Congress. It's not a war like the war in Iraq, where you're taking a specific piece of land against a specific government and it will have a conclusion. This war is not going to have a conclusion, anymore than the war against crime will have a conclusion,..." This is a sentiment I have been preaching for years.

The following comes from a segment entitled “Patriot, Poet” by Walter Berns, from the August 19, 2001 broadcast of Booknotes by C-Span:
“If we don’t have wars, we don’t need patriotism. On the other hand, we still need patriots who think of the country and think of their fellow citizens and are willing to make sacrifices for their fellow citizens, even if we’re not in wartime. … In the final paragraph of his First Inaugural, most of which is trying to persuade the Southern states not to secede from the Union, [Lincoln] ends with,
‘…We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Passion may have strained, but must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’”
I share this passage because, at the time of the writing of this review, August 2021, the nation is in the throes of another war, not fought with guns but with needles and masks. The COVID-19 pandemic is in its second year and cases are rising again, because of a new variant, to levels not seen since November 2020. The country is divided concerning whether or not to be vaccinated; not just the country but families and communities. Patriots are considered to be those who proclaim the right to choose to be “shot”, leaning toward not getting the vaccine. I suspect these words from Lincoln are unknown to most Americans. “With malice toward none,” perhaps we all need to hear them again.

One final comment. This book is a wonderful example of the outstanding presentations by C-Span. Indeed, it is a microcosm of what C-Span is all about --- a network that presents history as it happens and lessons about the history of the United States without commentary from those who work for the network. The only commentary you will hear is from the viewers, primarily on Washington Journal every morning. If you are looking for unfiltered news, C-Span is the network for you.

Four stars waxing

[Brooklyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very long and very repetitive read for school and was a bunch of interviews from different people about Lincoln

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book attempts - and for the most part I believe it succeeds - to present a balance view of Lincoln by presenting positions by Lincoln detractors as well as Lincoln admires. I found the essays regarding Lincoln's character to be fairly consistent with each other. Both the detractors as well as the admires agreed that Lincoln was a genius when it came to oration, writing, convincing people to join his cause, and getting things done. They also agree that Lincoln lacked true belief in the Christian religion, and said many troubling things regarding race (colonization, deportation, white supremacy, etc.). I believe that this book captures much of the true nature of who Lincoln was as a man, and I would recommend it as a fair treatment of Lincoln.

[Ede · Rating 2 out of 5]

Out of hundreds of books written on Lincoln I happened to buy this one and was in for a great disappointment. A book based on TV-series (prior to reading the book I had no idea what C-Span is) can never be a good thing but reading some of the "essays" by historians claiming "He was truly the best president" and then giving no further explanation is just a waste of time. There were actually just 2 interesting essays and the most valuable part of the book is probably "Part 5", the original texts by Lincoln himself.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much. It is a collection interviews of historians, journalists, and writers about Abraham Lincoln. They were taken from C-SPAN's Booknotes interviews. I found the differing opinions and interpretations of Lincoln's history to be very interesting. All articles are short, but each written in the author's own style and highlighting what Lincoln information they were knowledgable and interested in.

[Lanita · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite an interesting book about Abraham Lincoln. C-SPAN took all of their interviews with different authorites on Abe and converted them to essay form for this book. The result is a plethora of perspectives on Abraham, the civil war, and society in general during that time period. I loved it.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed bag of essays/interview transcripts. Some good Lincoln anecdotes and some unusual alternative viewpoints. However, the format meant a lot of material was repeated and some of the interview transcripts would have benefited from tighter editing. Perhaps more of a boomtown dip into than read cover to cover?

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A C-Span book that is most excellent! This book contains a wide variety of views on Lincoln. Providing a complete understanding of Lincoln, the state of the union at the time and the Civil War. If you love history this book is for you.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like having tivo'd all the good C-SPAN discussions with Lincoln authors. Nice resource.

[Brenden]

Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President by Brian Lamb (2008)

[Scott Archer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to the audio version, which is a bargain at $6 and offers fine narration and interesting material.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good enough...

[Honor Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compilation of essays and opinions of various historians on key parts of Lincoln's life and legacy. Edited by C-SPAN news, well done.