© 2025 WSIU Public Broadcasting
WSIU Public Broadcasting
Member-Supported Public Media from Southern Illinois University
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
91.9 FM has returned to full power. Thank you for your patience and support!

Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 222

Inside the Blanket Fort
SIU Press
/
SIU Press
Inside The Blanket Fort: Episode 222 - (7/10/25)

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.

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.

Tags
Mandi is the Publications Editor for SIU Press. She is also the author of six published novels, two short fiction collections, and numerous short stories. She earned her BA and MFA in creative writing from SIU , and during her MFA studies, she worked as a producer, senior editor, and voice actor for the first season of Blanket Fort Radio Theater, A Knight of Another Sort.
As a WSIU donor, you don’t simply watch or listen to public media programs, you are a partner. By making a gift, you help WSIU produce, purchase, and broadcast programs you care about and enjoy – every day of the year.