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Avg. Customer Rating:(based on 15 reviews) Sales Rank: 83742 Category: Book
Author:Orville Vernon Burton Publisher:Hill and Wang Studio:Hill and Wang Manufacturer:Hill and Wang Label:Hill and Wang Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published) Media: Paperback Edition: Reprint Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 432 Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9 Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2
Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age?s most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation?s millennial aspirations.
America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president?s authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country.
Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.
Burton Gives Us Hope to Become the Hope of the World Again September 26, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I had the profound experience of reading The Age of Lincoln. It is a great gift to all of us. Its interpretation is radically different. It sends the consensus theory of U.S. history packing better than anything I've ever read. The consensus theory, that there never was serious social conflict in the United States, was what every aspirant historian had to believe if they wanted to survive as a professional historian when I was young. This theory, along with overt racism and sexism, drove me out of the profession. Some of what Vernon Burton wrote even surprised me, especially the depth and violence of the class struggle in the United States during the nineteenth century. As a fellow southern historian, I am especially happy to read what he wrote about varying attitudes towards race among southern whites and organized, armed resistance to racist terror by blacks during Reconstruction. I cringe when I read the phrase "the racist Southern whites" which is repeated over and over by even the most politically correct historians. I share Burton's nostalgia for the moralistic, non-conformism of the transcendentalists and the southern yeoman values of Lincoln. These values are still there as part of our national heritage. I might be a blind optimist but I believe they are now reasserting themselves. I hope this book will be widely and carefully read and understood. It is not too late. We can still be the hope of the world. We are in the process of becoming one nation with freedom and justice for all: what Lincoln wanted.
A book that reads like a Ken Burns film...popular not just historical July 25, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dr. Burton succeeds in bring the reader back into the feel of the mid 19th century America. He calls the period roughly 20 years either side of Lincoln's inauguration "The Age of Lincoln". This is not a Lincoln book. Its about the transformation of the United States. The major themes are well documented by both the author and other review's here.
What is stunning is how accessible the book is to the non-historian. This is not a thesis work but a portrait of Americans. Woven around the framework of obvious historical events are individual stories and social trends. Specific stories, well researched and cited. All told in great narrative. I read alot of nonfiction and the occasional fiction , I can't label what the style is but its a bit like a Ken Burns documentary. You see the pictures. You hear the music. As you read. Its an easy to read book...something we readers can appreciate. Yet Burton is on solid factual ground. He brings so many facts and stories to light that I'm sure the work adds to the period's research. Even the book's cover adds to the overall work- a striking bloody red, white and blue across a typically American rural setting at sunset. Its a carefully chosen artwork circa 1861 entitled "Our Banner in the Sky" oil work by the American painter Church. Look at it here.
The reader is immersed in a difficult, painful yet singularly American period. The authors keeps the readers attention with a subtle yet brilliant literary style. Just read the first page.
A five-star work and one of the better books you'll ever read.
type is too small in paperback editioin July 15, 2008 0 out of 2 found this review helpful
The type size in the paperback edition is far too small for my (middle age) eyes.
Excellent, if difficult to classify June 29, 2008 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Orville Vernon Burton brings scholarship, passion and his own biases to this unusual account of the United States through the end of the 19th Century and a bit beyond.
Burton tracks the impact of ther Thirteen, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution on personal freedom for whites, blacks and everyone else. It is a fascinating book for several reasons.
First, Burton is a fine and conscientious scholar of the era. His research is evident on every page. His description of the Democratic Party, its role in the attempt to perpetuate slavery and in the awful depradations visited upon blacks after they acheived freedom is fully told here is fully told here. Burton also tells the history of the unfettered capitalism of the era and the attendant political cronyism that attended its rise. Here, there is a whiff that Burton might be an anti-capitalist himself, but it is difficult to tell with certainty.
What Burton does describe here is the heroic story of common people reaching out for personal freedom, for the right to be free of any kind of oppression. And here, Burton himself is heroic. He tells this story in great, almost overwhelming detail. His treatment of the Reconstruction Period is especially well done and will sadden most readers with its detail and possibly sicken some as well. As the zeal of the North's purpose cooled after the war, the Democratic Party became the handmaiden, if not the instigator, of terrible deeds. This is the most detailed social history of the period I have ever read.
Burton brings to life the enormous, jarring forces of change as freed slaves attempted to join the political, economic and social fabric of the nation, while defeated Southerners worked to subjugate them once again, while immigrants arrived in droves to expand the labor force and push down wages. The nation was still expanding westward, seeing the Native Americans as a force to be conquered, if not worse. Capital was being exploited in the form of new industries, bringing people off the farm into the cities where they became dependent upon the capitalists - and not without anger and resentment at their exploitation.
Burton tries to describe all these currents converging, with the blacks being stripped of their civil rights in the South, not being welcomed in the North and the capitalists colluding with the politicians to oppress everyone.
To his credit, Burton does the job well, but not perfectly. The march toward the end of the book and the end of the 19th Century becomes a bit bedraggled as Burton tries to wrap things up neatly. He doesn't do it neatly, but it really doesn't destroy the high quality of his work.
Overall, a truly unique and important history, even if a somewhat slow read.
Jerry
A Wonderful Book January 27, 2008 2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book draws together all the various elements of the decades surrounding Lincoln's presidency, and shows how the social pressures led to the Civil War and its eventual resolution.
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