"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency - as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking...

"The groundbreaking biography of a forgotten civil rights hero. In the tempestuous mid-19th century, as slavery consumed Congressional debate and America careened toward civil war and split apart--when the very future of the nation hung in the balance--Charles Sumner's voice rang strongest, bravest, and most unwavering. Where others preached compromise and moderation, he denounced slavery's evils to all who would listen and demanded that it be wiped...