Allen C. Guelzo

The Unhappy Fate of Fitz John Porter By Allen Guelzo The American Civil War was a political war. That should not matter hugely to those of us who study the art of command in the war, since it is one...

Lincoln & the League By Allen Guelzo The Union League of Philadelphia has occupied the grand corner of Broad and Sansom Streets in Philadelphia since 1865, and, though it remains today one of the most vibrant social and professional organizations...

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President An Interview with Allen Guelzo by Sara Gabbard  Sara Gabbard: Please explain the circumstances of this new edition of your book. Allen Guelzo: I have to answer this a little shamefacedly. I did it with a...

Redeeming The Great Emancipator the Harvard University Lecture An Interview with Allen Guelzo by Sara Gabbard Sara Gabbard: What were the circumstances surrounding your Lecture titled Redeeming the Great Emancipator. Allen Guelzo: That requires a long answer. Redeeming the Great...

Lincoln and Democracy By Allen C. Guelzo The word democracy occurs only 137 times in the collected writings of Abraham Lincoln. But no other word described what he saw as the most natural, the most just, and the most progressive...

Sara Gabbard: When you are “on the road” lecturing about Lincoln and the Civil War, what questions do members of the audience ask most frequently? Do responses from your students reflect the same interests?    Allen Guelzo: Far and away, the...

The Intellectual Milieu of Abraham Lincoln By Allen C. Guelzo Abraham Lincoln was not a philosopher, or even what we might today call an intellectual. “Politics were Lincoln’s life,” William Henry Herndon told Jesse Weik in 1887, “and newspapers were...

The day after Abraham Lincoln came from behind a well-populated field of potential candidates to win the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States, an “annoyed and dejected” Thurlow Weed packed his bags and prepared “to shake the...

Lincoln and his cabinet, LN-2651 Abraham Lincoln’s mature style as a writer and speaker was always terse, with little wastage of words. He loathed blow-hards, and remarked to a legal protégé in Illinois that one Chicago merchant who had turned...

On the day in April 1837 that Abraham Lincoln rode into Springfield, Illinois, to set himself up professionally as a lawyer, the American republic was awash in religion. Lincoln, however, was neither swimming nor even bobbing in its current.

As a nation, do we tend to ignore the history of Reconstruction?