Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times

By David S. Reynolds

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, History

Historian David S. Reynolds's 2020 biography places Abraham Lincoln within the popular culture that formed him and that he learned to speak to. From his frontier childhood in Kentucky and Indiana to the presidency, Reynolds shows how Lincoln absorbed the humor, oratory, religion, theater and reform movements of nineteenth-century America. Lincoln emerges as a politician who drew on that culture to hold together a divided country through the Civil War and to bring an end to slavery.

Recommended by 1 person

• Ryan Holiday: “So I went deeper. I read Hay and Nicolay. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 944-page Team of Rivals. Michael Gerhardt’s 496-page book on Lincoln’s mentors. David S. Reynolds’s 1088-page Abe.”