Young Samuel Lincoln, who had been apprenticed as a weaver in England, arrived in the Puritan colony of Boston Bay in 1637. Ida M. Tarbell traces the generations from Samuel to Abraham Lincoln, offering rich details of character and circumstance and showing that the president's ancestors were not precisely as his detractors painted them. She takes Abraham Lincoln from the cabin of his birth to the White House, where he is introduced to a nation in crisis.

Few politicians have fascinated the American people as much as Abraham Lincoln. The 1990s witnessed heightened interest in the sixteenth president and a flood of books about him that continues to the present. A recent tally indicates that at least 14,000 books and pamphlets have been written about him. The last guide to the best Lincoln books was produced in 1946. Since then several thousand more titles have been published. As a result, anyone interested in reading about him faces a daunting task in seeking out the books that offer the keenest insights into the man and the legend and lore that surround him. Michael Burkhimer's 100 Essential Lincoln Books offers a guide to this vast body of Lincoln literature. He chooses books that are indispensable for both book collectors and readers intent on learning more about Lincoln. The importance of each work is outlined with an emphasis on how it has contributed to Lincoln studies. Burkhimer's criteria for selection are based on the book's originality, sources, interpretations, writing style, and overall contribution. Titles are arranged chronologically in order of their first publication, ranging from 1866 (Francis B. Carpenter's Six Months at the While House with Abraham Lincoln) to 2002 (William Lee Miller's Lincoln's Virtues). The recent resurgence of interest in Lincoln is reflected in that almost one-third of the books described here have appeared since 1990. To further aid the curious Lincoln reader, each title is classified under a general heading, such as assassination, biography, family and genealogy, and reminiscences. Indexes of authors and headings are also included.

Excerpt from In the Footsteps of the Lincolns I found it an inspiring thing to trace the roads these seven successive generations of Lincoln pioneers traveled, to look upon the remains of their homes, reconstruct from documents and legends their activities, judge what manner of men and women they were, the place they held among their fellows. In these wanderings the whole history of the United States seemed to unroll before me. In this Lincoln migration we have the family history of millions of our contemporaries. And this story of their vigorous, independent pioneering, their passion for self-help and self-rule, goes far to account for Abraham Lincoln. He was not an accident. These Lin colns were behind him, preparing for the miracle. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal's fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr, 1876, Washington, D.C., Empire, and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation. Isolated in a ramshackle White House in the center of a proslavery city, Lincoln presides over a fragmenting government as Lee's armies beat at the gates. In this profoundly moving novel, a work of epic proportions and intense human sympathy, Lincoln is observed by his loved ones and his rivals. The cast of characters is almost Dickensian: politicians, generals, White House aides, newspapermen, Northern and Southern conspirators, amiably evil bankers, and a wife slowly going mad. Vidal's portrait of the president is at once intimate and monumental, stark and complex, drawn with the wit, grace, and authority of one of the great historical novelists. With a new Introduction by the author.

“If you read one book about Lincoln, make it A. Lincoln.”—USA Today NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Philadelphia Inquirer • The Christian Science Monitor • St. Louis Post-Dispatch. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER AWARD Everyone wants to define the man who signed his name “A. Lincoln.” In his lifetime and ever since, friend and foe have taken it upon themselves to characterize Lincoln according to their own label or libel. In this magnificent book, Ronald C. White, Jr., offers a fresh and compelling definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity–what today’s commentators would call “authenticity”–whose moral compass holds the key to understanding his life. Through meticulous research of the newly completed Lincoln Legal Papers, as well as of recently discovered letters and photographs, White provides a portrait of Lincoln’s personal, political, and moral evolution. White shows us Lincoln as a man who would leave a trail of thoughts in his wake, jotting ideas on scraps of paper and filing them in his top hat or the bottom drawer of his desk; a country lawyer who asked questions in order to figure out his own thinking on an issue, as much as to argue the case; a hands-on commander in chief who, as soldiers and sailors watched in amazement, commandeered a boat and ordered an attack on Confederate shore batteries at the tip of the Virginia peninsula; a man who struggled with the immorality of slavery and as president acted publicly and privately to outlaw it forever; and finally, a president involved in a religious odyssey who wrote, for his own eyes only, a profound meditation on “the will of God” in the Civil War that would become the basis of his finest address. Most enlightening, the Abraham Lincoln who comes into focus in this stellar narrative is a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, unafraid to “think anew and act anew.” A transcendent, sweeping, passionately written biography that greatly expands our knowledge and understanding of its subject, A. Lincoln will engage a whole new generation of Americans. It is poised to shed a profound light on our greatest president just as America commemorates the bicentennial of his birth.

Tn the Footsteps of the Lincolns. By IDA. M. TARBELL. A story of the origin and family of Abraham Lincoln. While the problem of pedigree is not so important as Miss Tarbell insists, this book is a useful accompaniment to her great life of the martyred President. Few reflect that Samuel Lincoln, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Lincoln, was only one of sixty-four ancestors of the same generation whose names are unknown to us, but whose blood he inherited. Our multiple ancestry makes the question of heredity a very confused question. But the book is interesting and valuable.

Hundreds of books have been written (and are still being written) about Abraham Lincoln. But in the annals of Lincoln history, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s father, is a largely neglected figure. He rates a few paragraphs in an otherwise large biography and has served as a quick backdrop to the birth and childhood of our sixteenth president. Early Lincoln biography did not consider Thomas worthy of much mention. William Herndon set the pattern for how Thomas has been viewed historically. Thomas was seen as “roving and shiftless”, lazy beyond repair. Thomas was said to be uneducated and against education. He was portrayed as mentally and physically slow, “careless, inert, and dull”. He was the obstacle Abraham overcame to become great. That view of Thomas Lincoln is wrong. Thomas was not dull or inert or lazy. He lived in a different path from that chosen by his illustrious son but he was not an obstacle his son had to overcome. Because of this view, many will consider this volume to be revisionist history. In a sense, it is. It will revise the standard view of Thomas based on the historical record available and place him as he was in the events and time in which he lived. However, it is not revisionist in the negative sense that wording often suggests. It is not built from twisting events or rewriting timeframes to make history into something it was not. Thomas Lincoln: Abraham’s Father will correct the old and errant understanding of Thomas Lincoln and show him the man he truly was. It will not enlarge him into something he was not nor will it lower him to be what many have thought him. Lincoln history has a gap in not having the story of Thomas Lincoln readily available. Hopefully this volume will open the doors to taking a new and serious look at the father who raised and shaped Abraham Lincoln’s early life.