Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason

Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason PDF Author: David Hirsch
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611210585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The secrets of one of history’s greatest orators are revealed in “one of the most stunningly original works on Abraham Lincoln to appear in years” (John Stauffer, professor of English and history, Harvard University). For more than 150 years, historians have speculated about what made Abraham Lincoln truly great. How did Lincoln create his compelling arguments, his convincing oratory, and his unforgettable writing? Some point to Lincoln’s study of grammar, literature, and poetry. Others believe it was the deep national crisis that gave import to his words. Most agree that he honed his persuasive technique in his work as an Illinois attorney. Here, the authors argue that it was Lincoln’s in-depth study of geometry that made the president’s verbal structure so effective. In fact, as the authors demonstrate, Lincoln embedded the ancient structure of geometric proof into the Gettysburg Address, the Cooper Union speech, the first and second inaugurals, his legal practice, and much of his substantive post-1853 communication. Also included are Lincoln’s preparatory notes and drafts of some of his most famous speeches as well as his revisions and personal thoughts on public speaking and grammar. With in-depth research and provocative insight, Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason “offers a whole new angle on Lincoln’s brilliance” (James M. Cornelius, Curator, Lincoln Collection, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum).

Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason

Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason PDF Author: David Hirsch
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611210585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Get Book Here

Book Description
The secrets of one of history’s greatest orators are revealed in “one of the most stunningly original works on Abraham Lincoln to appear in years” (John Stauffer, professor of English and history, Harvard University). For more than 150 years, historians have speculated about what made Abraham Lincoln truly great. How did Lincoln create his compelling arguments, his convincing oratory, and his unforgettable writing? Some point to Lincoln’s study of grammar, literature, and poetry. Others believe it was the deep national crisis that gave import to his words. Most agree that he honed his persuasive technique in his work as an Illinois attorney. Here, the authors argue that it was Lincoln’s in-depth study of geometry that made the president’s verbal structure so effective. In fact, as the authors demonstrate, Lincoln embedded the ancient structure of geometric proof into the Gettysburg Address, the Cooper Union speech, the first and second inaugurals, his legal practice, and much of his substantive post-1853 communication. Also included are Lincoln’s preparatory notes and drafts of some of his most famous speeches as well as his revisions and personal thoughts on public speaking and grammar. With in-depth research and provocative insight, Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason “offers a whole new angle on Lincoln’s brilliance” (James M. Cornelius, Curator, Lincoln Collection, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum).

Smashing the Liquor Machine

Smashing the Liquor Machine PDF Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States. Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.

Lincoln and Prohibition

Lincoln and Prohibition PDF Author: Charles Thomas White
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Temperance
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description


Alcohol and Public Policy

Alcohol and Public Policy PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309031494
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description


Lincoln in American Memory

Lincoln in American Memory PDF Author: Merrill D. Peterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198023049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Lincoln's death, like his life, was an event of epic proportions. When the president was struck down at his moment of triumph, writes Merrill Peterson, "sorrow--indescribable sorrow" swept the nation. After lying in state in Washington, Lincoln's body was carried by a special funeral train to Springfield, Illinois, stopping in major cities along the way; perhaps a million people viewed the remains as memorial orations rang out and the world chorused its sincere condolences. It was the apotheosis of the martyred President--the beginning of the transformation of a man into a mythic hero. In Lincoln in American Memory, historian Merrill Peterson provides a fascinating history of Lincoln's place in the American imagination from the hour of his death to the present. In tracing the changing image of Lincoln through time, this wide-ranging account offers insight into the evolution and struggles of American politics and society--and into the character of Lincoln himself. Westerners, Easterners, even Southerners were caught up in the idealization of the late President, reshaping his memory and laying claim to his mantle, as his widow, son, memorial builders, and memorabilia collectors fought over his visible legacy. Peterson also looks at the complex responses of blacks to the memory of Lincoln, as they moved from exultation at the end of slavery to the harsh reality of free life amid deep poverty and segregation; at more than one memorial event for the great emancipator, the author notes, blacks were excluded. He makes an engaging examination of the flood of reminiscences and biographies, from Lincoln's old law partner William H. Herndon to Carl Sandburg and beyond. Serious historians were late in coming to the topic; for decades the myth-makers sought to shape the image of the hero President to suit their own agendas. He was made a voice of prohibition, a saloon-keeper, an infidel, a devout Christian, the first Bull Moose Progressive, a military blunderer and (after the First World War) a military genius, a white supremacist (according to D.W. Griffith and other Southern admirers), and a touchstone for the civil rights movement. Through it all, Peterson traces five principal images of Lincoln: the savior of the Union, the great emancipator, man of the people, first American, and self-made man. In identifying these archetypes, he tells us much not only of Lincoln but of our own identity as a people.

The Broken Constitution

The Broken Constitution PDF Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374720878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State PDF Author: Lisa McGirr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
“[This] fine history of Prohibition . . . could have a major impact on how we read American political history.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review Prohibition has long been portrayed as a “noble experiment” that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor white communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes. Its targets coalesced into an electoral base of urban, working-class voters that propelled FDR to the White House. This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny. The War on Alcohol is history at its best—original, authoritative, and illuminating of our past and its continuing presence today.

Bootleg

Bootleg PDF Author: Karen Blumenthal
Publisher: Flash Point
ISBN: 1466801581
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
It began with the best of intentions. Worried about the effects of alcohol on American families, mothers and civic leaders started a movement to outlaw drinking in public places. Over time, their protests, petitions, and activism paid off—when a Constitional Amendment banning the sale and consumption of alcohol was ratified, it was hailed as the end of public drunkenness, alcoholism, and a host of other social ills related to booze. Instead, it began a decade of lawlessness, when children smuggled (and drank) illegal alcohol, the most upright citizens casually broke the law, and a host of notorious gangsters entered the public eye. Filled with period art and photographs, anecdotes, and portraits of unique characters from the era, this fascinating book looks at the rise and fall of the disastrous social experiment known as Prohibition. Bootleg is a 2011 Kirkus Best Teen Books of the Year title. One of School Library Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of 2011. YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist in 2012.

Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker PDF Author: Jennifer Chiaverini
Publisher: Dutton
ISBN: 0142180351
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini's compelling historical novel unveils the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln through the perspective of the First Lady's most trusted confidante and friend, her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. In a life that spanned nearly a century and witnessed some of the most momentous events in American history, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born a slave. A gifted seamstress, she earned her freedom by the skill of her needle, and won the friendship of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln by her devotion. A sweeping historical novel, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker illuminates the extraordinary relationship the two women shared, beginning in the hallowed halls of the White House during the trials of the Civil War and enduring almost, but not quite, to the end of Mrs. Lincoln's days.

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause

Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause PDF Author: Joe Coker
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813172802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In the late 1800s, Southern evangelicals believed contemporary troubles—everything from poverty to political corruption to violence between African Americans and whites—sprang from the bottles of “demon rum” regularly consumed in the South. Though temperance quickly gained support in the antebellum North, Southerners cast a skeptical eye on the movement, because of its ties with antislavery efforts. Postwar evangelicals quickly realized they had to make temperance appealing to the South by transforming the Yankee moral reform movement into something compatible with southern values and culture. In Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement, Joe L. Coker examines the tactics and results of temperance reformers between 1880 and 1915. Though their denominations traditionally forbade the preaching of politics from the pulpit, an outgrowth of evangelical fervor led ministers and their congregations to sound the call for prohibition. Determined to save the South from the evils of alcohol, they played on southern cultural attitudes about politics, race, women, and honor to communicate their message. The evangelicals were successful in their approach, negotiating such political obstacles as public disapproval the church’s role in politics and vehement opposition to prohibition voiced by Jefferson Davis. The evangelical community successfully convinced the public that cheap liquor in the hands of African American “beasts” and drunkard husbands posed a serious threat to white women. Eventually, the code of honor that depended upon alcohol-centered hospitality and camaraderie was redefined to favor those who lived as Christians and supported the prohibition movement. Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause is the first comprehensive survey of temperance in the South. By tailoring the prohibition message to the unique context of the American South, southern evangelicals transformed the region into a hotbed of temperance activity, leading the national prohibition movement.