Mark E. Neely

The Lincoln Family Album offers a rare and revealing glimpse into the private life of Abraham Lincoln and the first family. Showcasing original and previously unpublished photographs collected and preserved by Mary Todd Lincoln and four generations of descendants, the volume includes pictures displayed in a family album when the Lincolns lived in the White House. Chronicled are the lives of the Lincolns' three sons, including the tragic death of Willie in 1862, the rapid change of Tad during the war, and Robert's marriage, children, and political career. Soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War, period figures such as Tom Thumb and Henry Ward Beecher, and even the family dog also graced the album that became the nucleus of the Lincolns' personal collection. This updated edition, which provides both additional pictures and new introductory materials by renowned Lincoln scholars Mark E. Neely Jr. and Harold Holzer, paints a portrait of the Lincolns' rise to prominence and the exclusion of poorer relations after the family moved to the nation's capital. With 150 illustrations and detailed captions, this authoritative and enlightening nineteenth-century history also includes capsule biographies of the Lincolns' friends and relatives. In such images as the First Lady in mourning or the assassin John Wilkes Booth, the pictures cannot disguise the painful truth about a family that suffered as many tragedies as triumphs. Willie's death at the age of eleven abruptly ended Mary and Abraham's personal collecting, but Lincoln descendants continued the tradition. The last pages of ""The Lincoln Family Album"" conclude with the death of Robert Lincoln's last grandchild, Robert Todd Lincoln Beck - with, in 1985, ending the direct line of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.

Based on the discovery of records of over 4000 prisoners in Confederate military prisons, this work undermines the common understanding that Jefferson Davis and the Confederates were scrupulous in their respect for constitutional rights whilst Lincoln and the Unionists regularly violated them.

Mark E. Neely, Jr., gives us the first compact biography of Abraham Lincoln based on new scholarship. Neely, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, vividly recaptures the central place of politics in Lincoln’s life. Richly illustrated, nuanced and accessible, written with attention to the age in which Lincoln lived, yet ever alert to universal moral questions, this book provides a portrait of Lincoln as an extraordinary man in his own time and ours.