Kenneth J. Winkle

As someone who has lived in the DC area for over 20 years and who has studied this period extensively I still learned an amazing amount of this book. Winkle does a great job at evoking both the city that DC was prior to the Civil War and the city that it would become. Because it is really the war that creates the DC that people know today (and in fact created much of the US that people know today). Winkle weaves the geographical and cultural transformations of the nation's capital into a skillful narrative that probes Lincoln's thinking about slavery and abolition. While there were many influences on Lincoln's thought in this area, Winkle suggests--often implicitly, so as not to oversell the point--that it would have been hard for Lincoln not to be influenced by the racism and brutality toward both free and enslaved African Americans that was everywhere in DC. One of the many tragic ironies of the American Civil War is that the northern capital was in fact a strongly southern city located deep in enemy territory, in effect (and you don't have to travel very far outside today's capital to see that loyalty to a racist past still runs strong in Maryland).… (más)

One of my hobbies is genealogy. My mother's Denton family followed the same geographical progression from Kentucky to Illinois as Lincoln's family. I don't have letters or many detailed records about my family, but Winkle in this book about Lincoln has researched and interpreted the period and the area in a way that is enormously useful in helping me to understand what life was like for my great-great-great grandfather and his family group in Flat Branch, Illinois. I found the book fascinating and appreciated the excellent scholarship and analysis.… (más)

When I started to read this book, after a few dozen pages, I wasn't sure if I liked this book or not, since the book, in a way, really isn't about Lincoln. This book does a masterful job of helping the reader to clearly and completely understand America as it was as Lincoln was growing up. It is easy to judge Lincoln from a 21st century perspective, but how did Lincoln see the world from his own? This book provides a wealth of details about the world Lincoln lived in (including, of course, Lincoln and his role in it.) It provides many statistics to show, for example, the distribution of wealth in 1850's Springfield. (In fact, it provides so much information that you can almost envision the author in front of a computer screen trying to figure out just *one* more way of analyzing all the data. Sometimes the data provided is just overkill.) Ultimately, though, I felt that I learned a bit how Lincoln viewed his world and how it shaped him. Thus, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants that added perspective. (If that perspective is not important to you, then skip it.)… (más)