Category: Civil War

ESSAY –General Jackson is Dead

This essay original appeared in The Worlds of James Buchanan – Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, and John W Quist, LSU Press, (2019), 82-108. “General Jackson is dead”: Dissecting a Popular Anecdote of Nineteenth-Century Party Leadership…

ESSAY –After 1850

This chapter originally appeared in Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America, 1775-1860 ed. D.A. Pargas, U Press Florida, (2018), 93-115. After 1850: Reassessing the Impact of the Fugitive Slave Law Matthew Pinsker The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law…

ESSAY –Lincoln and Obama

This opinion piece by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared in The Weekly Wonk, an online magazine from the New America Foundation, in June 2014.  The original title was “Obama’s Lincoln Moment.”   There was a particularly tense period during the summer of 1862 when…

1860s

Overview When Booker T. Washington recalled the outbreak of the Civil War, he claimed that “every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery.”  Washington’s memory of life as young slave…

ESSAY –Lincoln Theme 2.0

In 2009, Matthew Pinsker published a state-of-the-field essay on Lincoln studies for the Journal of American History (“Lincoln Theme 2.0”), which argued that the digital revolution was fundamentally changing the way scholars research and write about Abraham Lincoln’s life and career.  The…

ESSAY –Emancipation Moments

The essay excerpted below originally appeared in Emancipation at 150: The Impact of Emancipation, a special e-book anthology produced in 2013 on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln’s Cottage and the US Commission on Civil Rights.   Emancipation…

ESSAY –Myth of Rivals

In 2008, Matthew Pinsker produced an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that challenged the way then President-Elect Barack Obama was interpreting the popular study of the Lincoln Administration (Team of Rivals) by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Pinsker’s short essay has been…

ESSAY –1860 in Springfield, Illinois

House Divided Project intern Don Sailer produced a vivid description of the 1860 Election Day in Springfield, Illinois.  Sailer doesn’t mention this fact in his concise post, but Abraham Lincoln only barely won his hometown in 1860, prevailing over Stephen A.…

ESSAY –Boss Lincoln

The essay by Matthew Pinsker originally appeared in The Living Lincoln, a collection of essays edited in 2011 by Thomas Horrocks, Harold Holzer, and Frank Williams in 2011 for Southern Illinois University Press.  The essay analyzes newly discovered documents that…