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Describes the Civil War from Abraham Lincoln's point of view in Washington, D.C., chronicling how the president supported fugitive slaves and also personally comforted wounded troops during wartime.

For decades Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s marriage has been characterized as discordant and tumultuous. In Abraham and Mary Lincoln , author Kenneth J. Winkle goes beyond the common image of the couple, illustrating that although the waters of the Lincoln household were far from calm, the Lincolns were above all a house united. Calling upon their own words and the reminiscences of family members and acquaintances, Winkle traces the Lincolns from their starkly contrasting childhoods, through their courtship and rise to power, to their years in the White House during the Civil War, ultimately revealing a dynamic love story set against the backdrop of the greatest peril the nation has ever seen.  When the awkward but ambitious Lincoln landed Mary Todd, people were surprised by their seeming incompatibility. Lincoln, lacking in formal education and social graces, came from the world of hardscrabble farmers on the American frontier. Mary, by contrast, received years of schooling and came from an established, wealthy, slave-owning family. Yet despite the social gulf between them, these two formidable personalities forged a bond that proved unshakable during the years to come. Mary provided Lincoln with the perfect partner in ambition—one with connections, political instincts, and polish. For Mary, Lincoln was her “diamond in the rough,” a man whose ungainly appearance and background belied a political acumen to match her own.  While each played their role in the marriage perfectly— Lincoln doggedly pursuing success and Mary hosting lavish political soirées—their partnership was not without contention. Mary—once described as “the wildcat of her age”—frequently expressed frustration with the limitations placed on her by Victorian social strictures, exhibiting behavior that sometimes led to public friction between the couple. Abraham’s work would at times keep him away from home for weeks, leaving Mary alone in Springfield.  The true test of the Lincolns’ dedication to each other began in the White House, as personal tragedy struck their family and civil war erupted on American soil. The couple faced controversy and heartbreak as the death of their young son left Mary grief-stricken and dependent upon séances and spiritualists; as charges of disloyalty hounded the couple regarding Mary’s young sister, a Confederate widow; and as public demands grew strenuous that their son Robert join the war. The loss of all privacy and the constant threat of kidnapping and assassination took its toll on the entire family. Yet until a fateful night in the Ford Theatre in 1865, Abraham and Mary Lincoln stood firmly together—he as commander-in-chief during America’s gravest military crisis, and she as First Lady of a divided country that needed the White House to emerge as a respected symbol of national unity and power.  Despite the challenges they faced, the Lincolns’ life together fully embodied the maxim engraved on their wedding bands: love is eternal. Abraham and Mary Lincoln is a testament to the power of a stormy union that held steady through the roughest of seas.

Mary Lincoln is a lightning rod for controversy. Stories reveal widely different interpretations, and it is impossible to write a definitive version of her life that will suit everyone. The thirteen engaging essays in this collection introduce Mary Lincoln’s complex nature and show how she is viewed today. The authors’ explanations of her personal and private image stem from a variety of backgrounds, and through these lenses—history, theater, graphic arts, and psychiatry—they present their latest research and assessments. Here they reveal the effects of familial culture and society on her life and give a broader assessment of Mary Lincoln as a woman, wife, and mother. Topics include Mary’s childhood in Kentucky, the early years of her marriage to Abraham, Mary’s love of travel and fashion, the presidential couple’s political partnership, and Mary’s relationship with her son Robert. The fascinating epilogue meditates on Mary Lincoln’s universal appeal and her enigmatic personality, showcasing the dramatic differences in interpretations. With gripping prose and in-depth documentation,  this anthology will capture the imagination of all readers.

Rader and Winkle reexamine the so called \"Baseball's Great Hitting Barrage of the 1990's, extending their analysis from the 2000 through the 2007 seasons. They employ statistics to better speculate about the effects of drugs on the great offensive barrage. They also tackle the decision of Major League Baseball to enlarge the de facto strike zone, determined by the umpires, and imposition of a more uniform strike zone on the umpires.

Slavery was deeply rooted in the history of the national capital. The Residence Act of 1790, which situated the District of Columbia between Maryland and Virginia, stipulated that the laws of those states would remain in force until the federal government moved in. When that happened in 1800, Congress simply agreed to maintain Maryland law in the city of Washington, including both slavery and a “Black Code” that restricted the lives of all African Americans, slave and free. The very creation of the capital depended on slave labor. Facing a scarcity of workers, federal commissioners used slaves to fell trees,

On July 8, 1862, Charles Homiller, a master butcher who kept a shop in Washington’s Centre Market, filed a petition with the District of Columbia’s Board of Commissioners for the Emancipation of Slaves. Homiller, who lived in Georgetown, requested compensation for one dozen slaves who had received their freedom in April under the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act.¹ One of them was Mary Ann Hawkins, a twenty-six-year-old slave whom Homiller had purchased when she was three or four years old. The petition described her as five feet tall, with a dark brown complexion and a “pleasant face.” To emphasize

Historians have noted the importance of chattel-mortgage financing in nineteenth-century Midwestern agriculture, including its contribution to farmer distress but have not examined its incidence, purposes, or practices in detail. Here the authors describe chattel mortgaging in the town of Springdale, Dane County, Wisconsin between 1848 and 1900, focusing on the borrowing and lending practices of the farmer householders listed in the population and agricultural federal census schedules of 1860 and 1880 and relating them to economic development, production patterns, and the ethnocultural backgrounds, tenure, and gender of the farm operators. They provide comparative data on the extent to which the farmers also borrowed on landed security. They include two detailed case histories of unsuccessful chattel borrowers but also show the importance of chattel credit in the agricultural mechanization that occurred during these years. This type of credit involved smaller principal sums than land credit but was a significant element in the business and commercial processes of the town and although more costly than land credit the difference was apparently less than has been suggested on the basis of experience elsewhere in this era. Farmer distress as reflected in foreclosures was greatest here at earlier dates than those of the Populist Era.