New York, Scholastic Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dustjacket. Color illustrations by Ted Lewin. Unpaginated. Skinny as a beanpole and tall for his age, an awkward young boy learns that Abraham Lincoln was called "gorilla, baboob, backwards hick." Yet along with big feet and big hands, Lincoln had a big heart and the great ability to keep a nation together. And what the boy learns as he studies Lincoln opens his mind to great possibilities for his own future.
Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 707 pages, b&w illustrations. Born in poverty, and self-educated while working in a print shop, William Lloyd Garrison was one of the United States' greatest crusading editors, putting out a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, for 35 years, beginning in 1831. A product of the rough and tumble political journalism of the day, Garrison wrote with extreme passion and from an uncompromising point of view. Yet the man who emerges from the pages of All on Fire is a deeply thoughtful person who, despite barely escaping lynch mobs himself, had a great sense of humor and a very polite demeanor. Historians have tended to minimize Garrison's impact on America, and some consider him a fringe character. But Henry Meyer, in this hefty biography, places Garrison at the center of his century, noting that Garrison's thought and tactics influenced not only the country's changing view of slavery, but also inspired the incipient feminist movement. The Lincoln administration noted Garrison's influence by inviting him to help raise the flag over the recaptured Fort Sumter. All on Fire goes into great detail on Garrison's life and work, providing the close and copious examination this activist's life fully deserves. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 292 pages, color and b&w photos. The famous, the infamous, and the never-before-seen are here in a remarkable 'democracy of images' Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Lucille Ball, Greta Garbo, Babe Ruth; the earliest views of the moon and the earliest panoramic view of Damascus; rare Native American photography; views of Asia, Africa, and the American West; photographs of early flight, and much, much more. In a bright dust jacket.
Hardcover. Washington, Smithsonian Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 292 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color and black and whote photos throughout. Clean, tight copy. The Smithsonian holds more than 13 million images spanning over 150 years of taking and collecting photographs. This largely unknown body of photography (most never before published) represents nothing less than the Smithsonian's effort, in the name of all Americans, to describe and comprehend the world. Open anywhere in these pages to be plunged into the history of our modernity, and see what the Smithsonian deemed important to document and preserve. The famous, the infamous, and the never-before-seen are here in a remarkable "democracy of images": Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Lucille Ball, Greta Garbo, Babe Ruth; the earliest views of the moon and the earliest panoramic view of Damascus; rare Native American photography; views of Asia, Africa, and the American West; photographs of early flight, and much, much more. By recording the act of seeing, and of what was seen, both photography and the Smithsonian have shaped our sense of ourselves, as individuals, as a people, and as a country.
Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Illustrated in color, b&w by the authors. In a lightly chipped dust jacket with fading to spine.
Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 683 pages, b&w illustrations. He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881-1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport--not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey--the man sportswriters dubbed "The Brain," "The Mahatma," and, on occasion, "El Cheapo"--Lee Lowenfish tells the full and colorful story of a life that forever changed the face of America's game. As the mastermind behind the Saint Louis Cardinals from 1917 to 1942, Rickey created the farm system, which allowed small-market clubs to compete with the rich and powerful. Under his direction in the 1940s, the Brooklyn Dodgers became truly the first "America's team." By signing Jackie Robinson and other black players, he single-handedly thrust baseball into the forefront of the civil rights movement. Lowenfish evokes the peculiarly American complex of God, family, and baseball that informed Rickey's actions and his accomplishments. His book offers an intriguing, richly detailed portrait of a man whose life is itself a crucial chapter in the history of American business, sport, and society.
Hardcover. NY, Time Life, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 401 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Dark blue leather bound with gilt titles to front cover and spine. Embossed decoration on front cover. Gilt text block edges, red ribbon marker. Clean, tight copy. This is one of the more impressive (and unfortunately little known) records of the American Civil War. John Beatty was a lawyer from Ohio who joined the Union Army when the South seceded. He started his service in western Virginia under General George B. McClellan. Although McClellan would later become one of the most well-known generals of the war, it was here that he first achieved the prominence that would lead to Lincoln promoting him to head Union forces on two separate occasions. Beatty, however, was clearly not enamored of McClellan. His journal opens with a description of arriving in one of the local railroad communities and subsequent entries describe the minutiae of camp life. Beatty is relatively unique among memoirists in that his book is largely a transcription of his original diary. As a result, his recollections are of recent events and have a degree of candor not present in many post-bellum narratives.
Hardcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 280 pages. The Ninth Massachusetts Infantry, which saw duty with the Army of the Potomac, was composed primarily of Irish immigrants and their descendants who hailed from Boston. One officer, Patrick R. Guiney, eventually rose to command the regiment as a colonel prior to suffering a service-ending wound in 1864. He left a full record of his men's activities in his letters to his wife, Jeannette; the letters also reveal that Guiney's political views, which leaned toward Lincoln and the Republicans, were not shared by most of his fellow officers or men. Editor Samito has provided a rather detailed prolog and annotation for the letters, which tell us as much about Guiney as a husband as they do about matters at the front. Among the numerous collections of Civil War letters that appear in print, these are distinguished for the author's forthright discussion of political and military affairs. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY/UK, Osprey Publishing, 2nd pr., 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 244 pages illustrated in b&w and color. The story of families enduring the whirlwind of the Civil War, told through the words of famous and ordinary citizens and ranging from the battlefield to the home front, from presidential councils to frontier revivals. The book reveals how Americans on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line withstood four years of brutal, unrelenting conflict. Of the hundreds of thousands of books published on the American Civil War, this is one of the few to approach the nation's defining conflict from this powerful perspective. Grounded in rare family letters and diaries, Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades captures Americans' wide-ranging reactions to the war and their astonishing perseverance. Some of the accounts are entirely unknown to readers, while better-known events are told from unusual perspectives. Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example, is shared from the viewpoint of Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancee (and stepsister) Clara Harris, while Lewis Powell's attempt on Secretary of State William Seward's life is seen through the terrified eyes Fanny Seward, who was seated next to her father when Powell burst into the room. Madison and Lizzie Bowler help readers understand how the war brought a Minnesota couple together in marriage and then nearly drove them apart when Madison insisted that his first duty was to his nation while Lizzie believed it was to her and their newborn daughter. A thousand miles to the south, two Texas families also suffered through their soldiers' absence and tried to explain to their young children why father had "gone to war" with "Santaclause." And to the north in Kentucky, a runaway slave won freedom for himself and his family by joining the Union Army only to face prejudice as brutal and destructive as the life he'd left behind. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 592 pages. Two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader's vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture. Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Adding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Kent OH, Kent State University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 387 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, unmarked in a bright dust jacket. The Lincoln images, originally appearing in such publications as Budget of Fun, Comic Monthly, New York Illustrated News, Phunny Phellow, Southern Punch, and Yankee Notions, significantly expand our understanding of the evolution of public opinion toward Lincoln, the complex dynamics of Civil War, popular art and culture, the media, political caricature, and presidential politics. Lincoln, appealed to illustrators because of his distinctive physical features. (One could scarcely conceive of a similar book on James Buchanan, his immediate predecessor.) Despite ever-improving techniques, Lincoln pictorial prominence competed favorably with any succeeding president in the nineteenth century.
Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st thus, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 693 pages with index, 16 pages of plates. A Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri offers the first annotated scholarly edition of Jean-Baptiste Truteau's journal of his voyage on the Missouri River in the central and northern Plains from 1794 to 1796 and of his description of the upper Missouri. This fully modern and magisterial edition of this essential journal surpasses all previous editions in assisting scholars and general readers in understanding Truteau's travels and encounters with the numerous Native peoples of the region, including the Arikaras, Cheyennes, Lakotas-Dakotas-Nakotas, Omahas, and Pawnees. Truteau's writings constitute the very foundation to our understanding of the late eighteenth-century fur trade in the region immediately preceding the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. French and English text. Bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. US, Knopf, 3rd printing, 1998-01-27, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 383 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.
Softcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, reprint, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 262 pages. Ellis offers a fresh interpretation of the legal culture of the Wild West. Written to dispel the myth of the lawless western culture, this book on Nebraska and the larger Great Plains demonstrates that most communities on the plains contained clearly defined legal systems, and that only on a few occasions did lawlessness appear. He has used an impressive variety of sources, including state and county archives, newspapers and relevant secondary works. With them he built a convincing case challenging the accepted view of frontier lawlessness. Clean copy.
Hardcover. San Marino,CA, The Huntington Library, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 161 pages. Official records from the Pinkerton detective agency & other documentary sources are drawn on to present the story of "a plot and counterplot, stranger than fiction" involving a plan to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln while en route to his inauguration in Washington in 1861, over 4 years before he was killed by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 226 pages. Bringing Lincoln's own words to young readers, a collection of the sixteenth president's speeches, letters, and writings reveals the man behind the politician and is highlighted by linocut illustrations depicting Lincoln and his times by Stephen Alcorn. Clean copy.
Softcover. Lincoln NE, iUniverse, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 236 pages. "Forward! Double-Quick!" and away we all rushed toward the fort... capturing two brass field pieces, one of which the rebels left loaded." A true account of Vermont men of color in battle during the Civil War. A barely known fact is that the tiny state of Vermont provided over one hundred and fifty African American soldiers to fight for the Union and by doing so, free millions of their own race. This is their story. Derived from historical archives and through their own words. Clean copy. Hastily signed by the author on the half-title page.
Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 391 pages, b&w illustrations. An excellent study of a military commander who transformed the American Frontier and the West. Based on a wide range of sources, including materials only recently made available to researchers, this first complete, carefully documented biography of Miles skillfully delineates the brilliant, abrasive, and controversial tactician whose career in many respects epitomized the story of the Old Army. Nelson A. Miles was probably the best Indian fighter produced by the U.S. Army between 1865 and 1890, figuring prominently in some of the most famous and significant conflicts between whites and Native Americans. This carefully documented biography of Miles skillfully delineates the brilliant, abrasive, and controversial tactician whose career in many respects epitomized the story of the Old Army. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Illustrated with portraits. Top edge gilt. 412 pages + ads. INSCRIBED BY RANKIN to Livingston C. Lord, President of Eastern Illinois University in 1917. Rankin, who died at 90 in 1927, was an early colleague and friend of Lincoln's from his Springfield days. Small ink number on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Columbus OH, Follett, Foster and Company, 1st, 1860, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, embossed brown cloth, 268 pages. Not first issue but an early printing with a "2" on page 13, line above publisher on copyright page, 2 leaves/4 pages of ads at front for The Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, The Exiles of Florida; Adela the Octoroon; then a letter from Mr. Lincoln opposite title page. Contemporary transcripts of perhaps the most consequential campaign debates in American history. While campaigning against each other for the Senate seat for Illinois, Douglas and Lincoln engaged in a series of public debates on slavery that earned nationwide attention. Lincoln and the young Republican Party capitalized on the attention, partly by having the debate transcripts published-laying the foundation for his successful presidential campaign. Page 1, 104, and 105 with pencil marking, light water stain to bottom corner of some pages, 1 X 1/4" chip to spine cloth. Otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Kent State University Press, 2nd pr., 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 381 pages. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR on the title page. In the summer of 1862, as Union morale ebbed low with home front division over war costs, coming emancipation, and demoralizing battlefield losses, 24-year-old William White Dorr enlisted as a lieutenant in the 121st Pennsylvania Volunteers, a new Union regiment organizing in Philadelphia. His father, the Reverend Benjamin Dorr, rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, strived to prevent divisions in his congregation from sundering that Episcopal church historically tied to the nation's founding. William F. Quigley Jr. presents a narrative that remarkably encapsulates much of the North's experience of the war. Reverend Benjamin Dorr was one of the most important clergymen of the era, who strived to hold his warring parishioners intact. His efforts paralleled Lincoln's far greater but comparable challenge to preserve the Union. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Hurd and Houghton, 1st, 1866, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 359 pages including index. Burgundy cloth with embossed rules front and back, with faded gilt lettering on spine. Name on front fly leaf (dated 1866) and title page. A clean, tight copy. Carpenter's memoir of Lincoln's tenure was written out of great admiration for Lincoln and his political platforms, in particular the Emancipation Proclamation.