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David Hirsch & Dan Van Haften on A House Divided

Join us on October 4 at 3pm(C) when David Hirsch and Dan Van Haften visit A House Divided.

Daniel Weinberg will talk with our guests about their latest work, A Tyranny of Public Discourse. This book establishes the six elements of a proposition as a verbal form of the scientific method—something Abraham Lincoln knew and used routinely. His logic and reason is so well known that it is quoted today more than 150 years after his death.

We will be streaming live, here at ALincolnBookShop.com and at our Facebook Page. Order Your Copy Today. Your book will ship after the program on October 4.

Do you have a question for our guests? Leave it in the Comments Section at the bottom of the Show Page. We will do our best to get it answered for you.

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Abraham Lincoln Signatures – A Primer

People are always curious about Abraham Lincoln Signatures. Where do they come from? What makes one example a “starter signature” and another a once-in-a-lifetime find?

In our latest video Daniel Weinberg shares examples of some of the most often seen types of Lincoln signatures. He also explains why knowing the differences can enhance your collecting experience.

A House Divided Welcomes Harold Holzer

20 February 2019

Join us when Harold Holzer returns to A House Divided. We’re live on the Author’s Voice Facebook page and at AuthorsVoice.net, March 21 at 3:30pm (C).

Holzer and Daniel Weinberg will talk about Holzer’s latest book, Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French. This is the very first biography of Daniel Chester French. This is a fulsome study of an artist whose life work both echoed and influenced the charging aesthetic of his era.

Order Your Signed, 1st edition Copy.

About The Book…

One of America’s most prolific sculptors of public monuments, Daniel Chester French created more than a hundred public works, including The Minuteman, Harvard University’s John Harvard, Columbia University’s Alma Mater, and most famously, the statue of Abraham Lincoln for the awe-inspiring Lincoln Memorial.

Born in 1850 and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, in the tumult of the Civil War, French’s meteoric ascent as an artist led him to cross paths with some of the most fascinating characters of his time, such as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Auguste Rodin, and Theodore Roosevelt.

In addition to his work as an artist, French was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1903 until his death in 1931 and was a key figure in the acquisition of the museum’s extensive collection of American sculpture.

Monument Man is the first definitive biography of Daniel Chester French, giving readers a captivating and extensively researched view into his world. The book also includes a comprehensive geographical guide to French’s public work.

Monument Man was specially commissioned by Chesterwood / National Trust for Historic Preservation. The release will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Chesterwood, his country home and studio, as a public site and with a major renovation of the Lincoln Memorial.

About Harold Holzer…

Harold Holzer is a Lincoln scholar and prize-winning author of numerous books on Civil War-era art and history, including Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion and Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America.

Holzer appears frequently on radio and television, most recently on C-SPAN and CNN and in Lincoln and Civil War documentaries for the BBC, PBS, and the History Channel.

Formerly the senior vice president for public affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and Foundation, he currently serves as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, City University of New York.

In 2008 Holzer was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. Watch the show LIVE at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Do you have a question for our author? Use the link at the web site to ask it now, or live during the show. We’ll share it with the author. Order your signed book, before, during or after the show. You can watch it again and again at our YouTube channel too.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

The Big Clean Up

UPDATE:

We are back! We have some minor cleaning to do but please come see us! Please call if you need to reach us for any reason, 312-944-3085.

A House Divided Presents
Frederick Douglass

9 January 2019

Join us when we welcome David Blight to A House Divided. We’re live on the Author’s Voice Facebook page and at AuthorsVoice.net, January 25, 2019 at 3pm (C).

Blight will talk with Bjorn Skaptason about his latest book, Frederick Douglass. This is the definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass. Douglass, an escaped slave became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. This is the first biography of Douglass in over twenty years.

Order Your Signed Copy Today.

About The Book…

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, often to large crowds, using his own story to condemn slavery. He broke with Garrison to become a political abolitionist, a Republican, and eventually a Lincoln supporter. By the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Douglass became the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. He denounced the premature end of Reconstruction and the emerging Jim Crow era. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. He sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s Frederick Douglass affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.

Order Your Signed Copy Today.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

Watch David Blight on A House Divided:

Peter S. Carmichael Visits A House Divided

Peter Carmichael joined us on November 30th to talk with Bjorn Skaptason about his book, The War for the Common Soldier. This book focuses on the experiences of the ordinary soldiers serving during the Civil War.

You can watch it here:

Unfortunately, we are sold out of copies of The War for the Common Soldier.

The War For The Common Soldier

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael’s sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience–the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought.

Digging deeply into his soldiers’ writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was “a common soldier” but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers’ experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Do you have a question for our author? Use the link at the web site to ask it now, or live during the show. On Facebook, use the Comments feature to ask your question. We’ll share it with the author during the show. Order your signed book, before, during or after the show. You can watch it again and again at AuthorsVoice.net our YouTube channel too.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

Doris Kearns Goodwin Visits A House Divided

Doris Kearns Goodwin joined us on A House Divided. Daniel Weinberg talked with Kearns Goodwin about her book, Leadership in Turbulent Times. You can watch it below:

We have a few copies still available, you can order yours here.

About Leadership in Turbulent Times

In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership.

Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?

In Leadership in Turbulent Times, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.

Leadership in Turbulent Times tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.

No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.

This crucial work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.

About Author’s Voice

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Stranger Than Fiction Presents
The Pitcher and the Dictator

Join us when we welcome Averell “Ace” Smith to Stranger Than Fiction. We’re live on Facebook and at AuthorsVoice.net, September 14 at 3pm (C). There will be an in-person signing as well, immediately following the broadcast at Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc. at 824 W. Superior St. in Chicago, IL.

Smith will talk with Bjorn Skaptason about his latest book, The Pitcher and the Dictator. This is an extraordinary story of race, politics, and some of the greatest baseball players ever assembled, playing high-stakes baseball in support of one of the Caribbean’s cruelest dictators.

Soon after Satchel Paige arrived at spring training in 1937 to pitch for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, he and five of his teammates, including Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell, were lured to the Dominican Republic with the promise of easy money to play a short baseball tournament in support of the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo. As it turned out, the money wasn’t so easy. After Paige and his friends arrived on the island, they found themselves under the thumb of Trujillo, known by Dominicans for murdering those who disappointed him.

In the initial games, the Ciudad Trujillo all-star team floundered. Living outside the shadow of segregation, Satchel and his recruits spent their nights carousing and their days dropping close games to their rivals, who were also stocked with great players. Desperate to restore discipline, Trujillo tapped the leader of his death squads to become part of the team management. The American players believed they might be lined up and shot if they lost the tournament.

When Paige’s team ultimately rallied to win, it barely registered with Trujillo, who a few months later ordered the killings of fifteen thousand Haitians at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Paige and his teammates returned to the states to face banishment from the Negro Leagues, but ironically they barnstormed across America wearing their Trujillo All-Stars uniforms.

Order Your Signed Copy Today!

About the Author: Averell “Ace” Smith is a political consultant and lifelong baseball fanatic. He is a thirty-year veteran of state and national politics and has directed winning campaigns from district attorney to president of the United States. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Smith spent over a decade researching this book including travelling to the Dominican Republic. He lives in Kentfield, California with his wife Laura Talmus.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

A House Divided – Double Header

Author’s Voice presents A House Divided. Join us on August 2nd when we welcome two authors for two episodes.

At 3:00pm (C) we welcome Manisha Sinha to talk about her book, The Slave’s Cause.

The Slaves Cause is a groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War

The general belief casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.

Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This groundbreaking history of abolition recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Join us at 3pm; Bjorn Skaptason hosts.

Order Your Signed Copy

Following at 5pm (C) Paul Taylor joins Daniel Weinberg to talk about The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known. Taylor’s book examines the Union League movement.

Often portrayed as a mere footnote to the Civil War, the Union League’s influence on the Northern homefront was far more important and consequential than previously considered.

The martial enthusiasm that engulfed the North when the American Civil War commenced in April 1861 vanished by the following summer. Repeated military defeats, economic worries, and staggering casualties prompted many civilians to question the war’s viability. Frustration exploded into anger when Republican president Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September.

The disgruntled voices grew louder. These anti-Lincoln Democrats, nicknamed Copperheads, viewed blacks with disdain and considered many of Lincoln s legal decisions to be unconstitutional. Civilian disenchantment led to significant Republican defeats in the November Congressional elections. As 1862 ended, Northern morale was at rock bottom.

Across the North, ardent pro-Lincoln men realized their country needed a patriotic stimulus, as well as an organized means of countering what they viewed as their Copperhead adversaries treasonous pronouncements and subversion. These men formed what became known as Union Leagues: semisecretive societies whose members had to possess unconditional loyalty to the Lincoln administration and unwavering support for all of its efforts to suppress the rebellion. Their mysterious member initiation rites were likened to a solemn religious ceremony.

The Union League and its various offshoots spread rapidly across the North, and in this first comprehensive examination of the leagues, Taylor discusses what made them so effective, including their recruitment strategies, their use of ostracism as a way of stifling dissent, and their distribution of political propaganda in quantities unlike anything previously imagined. By the end of 1863, readers learn, it seemed as if every hamlet from Maine to California had formed its own league chapter, collectively overwhelming their Democratic foe in the 1864 presidential election.

Order Your Signed Copy

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

A House Divided Presents
A Campaign of Giants

Scroll down to the bottom to watch this program. Order Your Copy

Join us for A House Divided on July 19 at 5:00 pm (C) when A. Wilson Green talks with Bjorn Skaptason about A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1.

Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War’s longest and among its most complex. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee squared off for more than nine months in their struggle for Petersburg, the key to the Confederate capital at Richmond.

Featuring some of the war’s most notorious battles, the campaign played out against a backdrop of political drama and crucial fighting elsewhere, with massive costs for soldiers and civilians alike. After failing to bull his way into Petersburg, Grant concentrated on isolating the city from its communications with the rest of the surviving Confederacy, stretching Lee’s defenses to the breaking point. When Lee’s desperate breakout attempt failed in March 1865, Grant launched his final offensives that forced the Confederates to abandon the city on April 2, 1865. A week later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.

Here A. Wilson Greene opens his sweeping new three-volume history of the Petersburg Campaign, taking readers from Grant’s crossing of the James in mid-June 1864 to the fateful Battle of the Crater on July 30. Full of fresh insights drawn from military, political, and social history, A Campaign of Giants is destined to be the definitive account of the campaign. With new perspectives on operational and tactical choices by commanders, the experiences of common soldiers and civilians, and the significant role of the United States Colored Troops in the fighting, this book offers essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Civil War.

A. Wilson Greene is the former president of the Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier and author of The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign.

Order Your Signed Copy Today! We’ll ship it right after the show. Remember to watch at AuthorsVoice.net or Live at our Facebook page on the 17th at 3:30pm CST.

Author’s Voice connects authors to the world! Our live stream can be watched from any platform, on any device. You can watch at AuthorsVoice.net or at our Facebook Page.

Keep in touch on social media, via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Find us on all the platforms by searching for authorsvoice.

About The Book…

About Harold Holzer…

About The Book…

About Author’s Voice

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