Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we explore two SIU Press entries in the Concise Lincoln Library series that made their debuts in paperback in the Fall of 2024: Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies by Thomas A. Horrocks and Lincoln and the War’s End by John C. Waugh.
SIU Press’s Concise Lincoln Library series features roughly thirty titles. Through short, focused books, each concentrating on a different area of Lincoln’s life and career, the Concise Lincoln Library brings fresh perspectives to well-known topics, investigates previously overlooked subjects, and explores in greater depth topics that have not previously received book-length treatment.
During the 1860 and 1864 presidential campaigns, Abraham Lincoln was the subject of over twenty campaign biographies. In the innovative study Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies, published in hardcover in 2014, Thomas A. Horrocks examines the role that these publications played in shaping an image of Lincoln that would resonate with voters and explores the vision of Lincoln that the biographies crafted, the changes in this vision over the course of four years, and the impact of these works on the outcome of the elections.
Douglas R. Egerton, author of Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War, says, “For the intensely private Abraham Lincoln, crafting an autobiography was nearly as painful as reading those campaign profiles written about him. As Thomas A. Horrocks demonstrates in this engaging and crisply written study, a series of political writers and editors faced [an] uphill battle in selling the one-term congressman to a skeptical, divided nation, and then selling him again four years later to a war-weary public.
On this edition of Inside The Blanket Fort.
