Conceived in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the grief that swept France over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty has been a potent symbol of the nation's highest ideals since it was unveiled in 1886. Dramatically situated on Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island) in the harbor of New York City, the statue has served as a reminder for generations of immigrants of America's long tradition as an asylum for the poor and the persecuted. Although it is among the most famous sculptures in the world, the story of its creation is little known. In Enlightening the World, Yasmin Sabina Khan provides a fascinating new account of the design of the statue and the lives of the people who created it, along with the tumultuous events in France and the United States that influenced them. Khan's narrative begins on the battlefields of Gettysburg, where Lincoln framed the Civil War as a conflict testing whether a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal... can long endure." People around the world agreed with Lincoln that this question—and the fate of the Union itself—affected the "whole family of man." Inspired by the Union's victory and stunned by Lincoln's death, Édouard-René Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a legal scholar and noted proponent of friendship between his native France and the United States, conceived of a monument to liberty and the exemplary form of government established by the young nation. For Laboulaye and all of France, the statue would be called La Liberté Éclairant le Monde—Liberty Enlightening the World. Following the statue's twenty-year journey from concept to construction, Khan reveals in brilliant detail the intersecting lives that led to the realization of Laboulaye's dream: the Marquis de Lafayette; Alexis de Tocqueville; the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, whose commitment to liberty and self-government was heightened by his experience of the Franco-Prussian War; the architect Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to study architecture at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, who pushed the limits for large-scale metal construction. Also here are the contributions of such figures as Senators Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, the artist John La Farge, the poet Emma Lazarus, and the publisher Joseph Pulitzer. While exploring the creation of the statue, Khan points to possible sources—several previously unexamined—for the design. She links the statue's crown of rays with Benjamin Franklin's image of the rising sun and makes a clear connection between the broken chain under Lady Liberty's foot and the abolition of slavery. Through the rich story of this remarkable national monument, Enlightening the World celebrates both a work of human accomplishment and the vitality of liberty.

The American Civil War was without doubt the defining event in the history of the United States. This up-to-date analyisis of a critical period goes beyond the origins, course and consequences of the Civil War to bring in other important themes such as racial conflict, gender relations, religion, the popular memory and state formation.

In "We Cannot Escape History" a remarkable group of top Lincoln and Civil War scholars come together to explore the meaning of Lincoln for the destiny of the United States. They focus on Lincoln's view of American history and on his legacy - for Americans and for the world. In the process they deepen the reader's understanding of and appreciation for the complexity of the problems Lincoln faced and for the genius of his leadership, which surmounted these obstacles and preserved the United States as one nation indivisible while purging it of slavery, which had marred the democratic and egalitarian promise of America from the beginning. The contributors develop themes including Lincoln's conception of the United States as the last best hope for the preservation of democratic government and a republican polity, his view of American history and its meaning, his international impact, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and the uses of political power, and Lincoln as commander-in-chief in time of war.

George Palmer Putnam (1814&–1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary culture. In this comprehensive cultural biography, Ezra Greenspan offers a wide-ranging account of a rich, productive life lived in print, interrelating Putnam&’s life with the life of his family (one of the most remarkable of its time), with the changing patterns of life in New York City and the nation, and with the institutionalization of modern print culture in nineteenth-century America. Putnam&’s roles and achievements were many: he established and ran the publishing house of G. P. Putnam&’s in New York City; published many of the leading American antebellum writers, male and female, canonical and noncanonical (indeed, was responsible for the first act of American canonization&—of Washington Irving); was the leading publisher of art books in his time and launched Putnam's Monthly; led efforts resulting in the institutionalization of the American publishing industry and was the most outspoken promoter of American authorship; led the fight in the United States for international copyright; was the first American publisher to open an overseas (London) branch office; and for a decade was the leading American agent in the international book trade. Putnam&’s achievements were not limited to his professional sphere: he was also the founding Superintendent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the official publisher to the New York World's Fair of 1853, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue in New York City during the Civil War, and the organizer of the greatest authors-publishers dinner ever given in nineteenth-century America. Friend and confidant to many of the leading figures of his time, he was not simply a centrally placed publisher but was one of the most centrally placed people of his entire society. This study is based on meticulous archival research into not only Putnam's own papers but into the records of his business, the papers of other family members, and the archives of persons with whom Putnam had contact through business and social networks. In a finely detailed narrative, Greenspan weaves together the story of Putnam's life and that of the development of print culture in nineteenth-century America to offer an ambitious, comprehensive biography of this &"representative American publisher.&"