Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Paperback / softback Book

Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents.

From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection.

Drawing on a wide array of materials - painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspaper accounts and oratory - Barry Schwartz aims at this sort of contradiction in his study of the role Lincoln's reputation and memory has played in American life.

Schwartz explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions and how his reputation, over the next four decades, diminished and grew.

Schwartz links the vagaries of Lincoln's image to broad transformations of the nation, arguing that Lincoln's life symbolized America's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and articulated the roles of economic and political reform, military power and nationalism in the country's self-conception. Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp", acting as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political and regional communities.

The first part of the study that will continue through the present, "Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory" is the story of how America has shaped its past selectivey and imaginatively, but around a real person whose character and achievements symbolized his country's ideals.

Information

£26.00

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information