2020 Holiday Gift Guide

Contents The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago by Patrick T. Reardon 1 Tales of Forgotten Chicago by Richard C. Lindberg 2 Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick by Andrea Friederici Ross 3 In Their Letters, In Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home edited by Mark Flotow 4 Illinois History Headliners 5 Hinge by Molly Spencer. 6 Maps for Migrants and Ghosts by Luisa A. Igloria 7 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 8–9 Imagining Wild Bill: James Butler Hickok in War, Media, and Memory

by Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill 10 Engaging the Civil War Series 11 The Impulse of Victory: Ulysses S. Grant at Chattanooga by David A. Powell 12 World of Ulysses S. Grant Series 13 Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice

by Thomas F. Curran 14 Civil War Campaigns in the West Series 15 Concise Lincoln Library 16–17

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The Loop: The “L” Tracks that Shaped and Saved Chicago Patrick T. Reardon

The structure that anchors Chicago

$26.95, 312 pages, 32 illustrations Paper: 978-0-8093-3810-8 E-book: 978-0-8093-3811-5

In engagingly brisk prose, Patrick T. Reardon unfolds the fascinating story about how Chicago’s elevated Loop was built, gave its name to the downtown, helped unify the city, saved the city’s economy, and was itself saved from destruction in the 1970s.

This unique volume combines urban history, biography, engineering, architecture, transportation, culture, and politics to explore the elevated Loop’s impact on the city’s development and economy and on the way Chicagoans see themselves.

The Loop rooted Chicago’s downtown in a way unknown in other cities, and it protected that area—and the city itself— from the full effects of suburbanization during the second half of the twentieth century.

Masses of data underlie new insights into

what has made Chicago’s downtown, and the city as a whole, tick.

The Loop features a cast of colorful Chicagoans, such as legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow, poet Edgar Lee Masters, mayor Richard J. Daley, and the notorious Gray Wolves of the Chicago City Council.

Charles T. Yerkes, an often-demonized figure, is shown as a visionary urban planner, and engineer John Alexander Low Waddell, a world-renowned bridge creator, is introduced to Chicagoans as the designer of their urban railway.

This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago’s elevated Loop.

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

“This exceptional book enables us to see, as if for the first time, something that is right under our noses. It is almost impossible to imagine downtown Chicago and the Loop ‘L’ without each other, and Patrick T. Reardon explains just why that is so in a lively narrative full of information and insights.”

You might also enjoy:

—Carl Smith, author of Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City

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Tales of Forgotten Chicago Richard C. Lindberg Hidden gems from Chicago’s past

$24.95, 280 pages, 24 illustrations Paper: 978-0-8093-3781-1 E-book: 978-0-8093-3782-8

Tales of Forgotten Chicago contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories about a great city and its people. Richard C. Lindberg has dug deeply to reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago’s past.

Spanning the Civil War through the 1960s, the volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences: poisoned soup that nearly killed three hundred leading citizens, politicians, and business and religious leaders; a woman in showbiz and her street-thug husband whose checkered lives inspired a 1955 James Cagney movie; and the first police woman in Chicago, hired as a result of the senseless killing of a young factory girl in a racially tinged case of the 1880s.

Also included are tales of industry and invention, such as America’s first automobile

race, the haunting of a wealthy Gilded Age manufacturer’s mansion, and the identity of the telephone’s rightful inventor. Chapters on the history of early city landmarks spotlight the fight to save Lakefront Park and how “Lucky” Charlie Weeghman’s North Side baseball park became Wrigley Field.

Other chapters explore civic, cultural, and political happenings: the great Railroad Fairs of 1948 and 1949; Richard J. Daley’s revival of the St. Patrick’s Day parade; political disrupter Lar “America First” Daly; and the founding of the Special Olympics in Chicago by Anne Burke and others. Finally, some are just wonderful tales, such as a touching story about the sinking of Chicago’s beloved Christmas tree ship.

Engrossing and imaginative, this collection opens new windows into the past of the Windy City.

Richard C. Lindberg is an award-winning author, journalist, and lecturer who has written nineteen other books about Chicago history, politics, criminal justice, sports, and ethnicity. The 2011 memoir of his Northwest Side boyhood, Whiskey Breakfast: My Swedish Family, My American Life, was named nonfiction book of the year by the Chicago Writer’s Association.

“This book is full of engaging pleasures. It’s a mustread for anyone drawn to Chicago history.”

You might also enjoy:

—Greg Borzo, author of Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains

“A compilation of stories of a little-known other side of Chicago—a side that is infinitely more interesting.”

—Richard F. Bales, author of The Great Chicago Fire and the Myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow

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Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McComick Andrea Friederici Ross Chicago’s quirky patron saint

$29.95, 248 pages, 34 illustrations Cloth: 978-0-8093-3790-3 E-book: 978-0-8093-3791-0

This thrilling story of a daughter of America’s foremost industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, is complete with sex, money, mental illness, and opera divas—and a woman who strove for the independence to make her own choices. Rejecting the limited gender role carved out for her by her father and society, Edith Rockefeller McCormick forged her own path, despite pushback from her family and ultimate financial ruin.

A parsimonious upbringing did little to prepare Edith for life after marriage to Harold McCormick, son of the Reaper King Cyrus McCormick. The rich young couple spent lavishly. They purchased treasures like the jewels of Catherine the Great, entertained in grand style in a Chicago mansion, and contributed to the city’s cultural uplift, founding the Chicago Grand Opera. They supported free health care for the poor, founding and supporting the John R. McCormick Memorial Institute for

Infectious Diseases. Later, Edith donated land for what would become Brookfield Zoo. Though she lived a seemingly enviable life, Edith’s disposition was ill-suited for the mores of the time. Societal and personal issues caused Edith to experience phobias and panic attacks. Dissatisfied with rest cures, she ignored her father’s expectations, moved her family to Zurich, and embarked on a journey of education and self-examination. Edith pursued analysis with then-unknown Carl Jung. Her generosity of spirit led Edith to become Jung’s leading patron.

She also supported up-and-coming musicians, artists, and writers, including James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses.

Respectful and truthful, Andrea Friederici Ross presents the full arc of this amazing woman’s life and expertly helps readers understand Edith’s generosity, intelligence, and fierce determination to change the world.

Andrea Friederici Ross is the author of Let the Lions Roar! The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo. A native of the Chicago area and a graduate of Northwestern University, Ross works in a grade school library, where she encourages young readers to develop a lasting love of books.

“A deeply researched, briskly readable account of the life of Chicago grande dame Edith Rockefeller McCormick. . . . This is fascinating, stranger-than-fiction Chicago history, and a pageturner. Can’t wait for the miniseries it’s sure to inspire.”

You might also enjoy:

—Deanna Issacs, Chicago Reader

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In Their Letters, in Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home Edited by Mark Flotow Illinois State Historical Society Book of the Year Award Winner, 2020

$26.50, 320 pages, 12 illustrations Paper: 978-0-8093-3763-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3764-4

A vital lifeline to home during the Civil War, the letters of soldiers to their families and friends remain a treasure for those seeking to connect with and understand the most turbulent period of American history.

Rather than focus on the experiences of a few witnesses, this impressively researched book documents 165 Illinois Civil War soldiers’ and sailors’ lives through the lens of their personal letters. Editor Mark Flotow chose a variety of letter writers who hailed from counties throughout the state, served in different branches of the military at different ranks, and represented the gamut of social experiences and war outcomes.

Flotow provides extensive quotations from the letters and allows soldiers to speak for themselves. Illinois soldiers wrote about their reasons for enlisting; the nature of training

and duties; necessities like eating, sleeping, marching, and making the best of often harsh and chaotic circumstances; Southern culture; slavery; their opinions of commanding officers and the president; disease, medicine, and hospitals; their prisoner-of-war experiences; and the ways they left the army.

Through letters from afar, many soldiers sought to manage their homes and farms, while some single men attempted to woo their sweethearts.

Flotow includes brief biographies for each soldier quoted in the book, weaves historical context and analysis with the letters, and organizes them by topic. Thus, intimate details cited in individual letters reveal their significance for those who lived and shaped this tumultuous era. The result is not only insightful history but also compelling reading.

Mark Flotow is an adjunct research associate in anthropology at the Illinois State

Museum and a volunteer interviewer with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s oral history program. Flotow has published articles about Illinois Civil War soldiers in Illinois Heritage and has given many presentations on the topic.

“Mark Flotow does so much more than is typical of a book of Civil War letters.”

—Dave Page, Journal of America’s Military Past

You might also enjoy:

“Walt Whitman famously once wrote about the Civil War that ‘the real war will never get in the books.’ If Mark Flotow’s new edited volume does not capture ‘the real war,’ then it is doubtful that any book ever will.”

—Cameron Sauers, Cleveland Review of Books

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Illinois History Headliners See more at www.siupress.com/regional

Regional Titles Available for Preorder

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Hinge

Molly Spencer Finding joy and beauty in the face of suffering

$16.95, 96 pages Paper: 978-0-8093-3797-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3798-9 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Winner

Readers enter “a stunted world,” where landmarks—a river, a house, a woman’s own body—have become unrecognizable in a place as distorted and dangerous as any of the old tales poet Molly Spencer remasters in this elegant, mournful collection. In myth and memory, through familiar stories reimagined, she constructs poetry for anyone who has ever stumbled, unwillingly, into a wilderness. In these alluring poems, myth becomes part of the arsenal used to confront the flaws and failures of our fallible bodies. Shadowing the trajectory of an elegy, this poetry collection of lament, remembrance, and solace wrestles with how we come to terms with suffering while still finding joy, meaning, and beauty.

Spencer alternates between the clinical and the domestic, disorientation and reorientation, awe and awareness. With the onset of a painful chronic illness, the body and mental geography turn hostile and alien.

In loss and grief, in physical and psychological landscapes, Spencer searches the relationship between a woman’s body and her house—places where she is both master and captive—and hunts for the meaning of suffering. Finally, with begrudging acceptance, we have a hypothesis for all seasons: there is suffering, there is mercy; they are not separate but are for and of one another.

Molly Spencer’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, Gettys-

burg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She is a poetry editor at Rumpus. Her debut collection, If the House, won the 2019 Brittingham Prize, selected by Carl Phillips.

“Spencer has crafted a collection that thrives in contradiction, buoying opposing forces that fuse into an eerie, ethereal, ultimately hopeful truth.”

—Megan Otto, Chicago Review of Books

“Through legend and landscape, in her lush and razor-sharp lines, Molly Spencer’s newest collection, Hinge, navigates mothering and the passage of time in the throes of chronic illness.

Her poems illuminate what it means to inhabit a body turning on itself, to come to knowledge by loss and by absence.

These are poems that exquisitely tend to the work of living.”

—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Water & Salt

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Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

Luisa A. Igloria Language as key and map to places, people, and histories lost

$16.95, 110 pages Paper: 978-0-8093-3792-7 E-book: 978-0-8093-3793-4 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Winner

For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before.

In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations.

Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation.

Language serves as a key and a map to the places and people that have been lost.

This collection folds memories, encounters, portraits, and vignettes, familiar and alien, into both an individual history and a shared collective history—a grandfather’s ghost stubbornly refusing to come in out of the rain, an elderly mother casually dropping YOLO into conversation, and the speaker’s abandonment of her childhood home for a second time.

The poems in this collection spring out of a deep longing for place, for the past, for the selves we used to be before we traveled to where we are now, before we became who we are now. A stunning addition to the work of immigrant and migrant women poets on their diasporas, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts reveals a dream landscape at the edge of this world that is always moving, not moving, changing, and not changing.

Luisa A. Igloria is the author of fourteen books of poetry, most recently The Buddha

“These poems are adamantine— dazzling and diamond-strong.”

Wonders If She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis; and the recipient of many awards including the May Swenson Prize and the Resurgence Poetry Prize, the world’s first major ecopoetry award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, Lantern Review, and Cha.

—Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder

“Urgent yet delicate, Luisa A. Igloria’s poetry excavates the rich material of the past. The poems fashion and refashion the self in flashes of dreams, apparitions of family long departed, and haunting regret.”

—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth and Furious Lullaby

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Crab Orchard Series in Poetry See the full list of titles at www.siupress.com/poetry

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Twenty Years of Excellence and Counting

The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry was founded in 1999 in a partnership between the Crab Orchard Review and Southern Illinois University Press.

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Imagining Wild Bill: James Butler Hickok in War, Media, and Memory Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill Wild Bill’s ever-evolving legend

$26.50, 272 pages, 15 illustrations Paper: 978-0-8093-3788-0 E-book: 978-0-8093-3789-7 Engaging the Civil War

When it came to the Wild West, the nineteenth-century press rarely let truth get in the way of a good story. James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s story was no exception.

Mythologized and sensationalized, Hickok was turned into the deadliest gunfighter of all, a so-called moral killer, a national phenomenon even while he was alive.

Rather than attempt to tease truth from fiction, coauthors Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill investigate the ways in which Hickok embodied the culture of glamorized violence Americans embraced after the Civil War. And they examine how his story emerged, evolved, and turned into a viral multimedia sensation full of the excitement, danger, and romance of the West.

Journalists, the coauthors demonstrate, invented “Wild Bill” Hickok, glorifying him

as a civilizer. They inflated his body count and constructed his legend in the midst of an emerging celebrity culture that grew up around penny newspapers. His death by treachery, at a relatively young age, made the story tragic, and dime-store novelists took over where the press left off.

American culture often embraces myths that later become accepted as popular history. By investigating the allure and power of Hickok’s myth, Ashdown and Caudill explain how American journalism and popular culture have shaped the way Civil War–era figures are remembered and reveal how Americans have embraced violence as entertainment.

Both Paul Ashdown and Edward Caudill are professors emeritus of journalism at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They have cowritten Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend; Sherman’s March in Myth and Memory; The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest; and The Mosby Myth: A Confederate Hero in Life and Legend.

“A spirited and carefully framed reassessment that is thoughtful, nuanced, and most important, fair to a subject who is otherwise evasive to the claims of mere mortals.”

—Bryan Giemza, author of Images of Depression-Era Louisiana: The FSA Photographs of Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott

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“An invaluable examination of the evolving interpretations and myths woven around Western demigod Wild Bill Hickok. This study is invitingly written, overflowing with fresh information, and balanced in its approach and conclusions.”

—Richard W. Etulain, author of The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane

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More from Engaging the Civil War

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ENGAGING the CIVIL WAR

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The Impulse of Victory: Ulysses S. Grant at Chattanooga David A. Powell How Grant secured a Tennessee victory and a promotion

$34,50, 264 pages, 29 illustrations Cloth: 978-0-8093-3801-6 E-book: 978-0-8093-3802-3 World of Ulysses S. Grant

Union soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland, who were trapped and facing starvation or surrender in the fall of 1863, saw the arrival of Major General Ulysses S. Grant in Tennessee as an impetus to reverse the tides of war. David A. Powell’s sophisticated strategic and operational analysis of Grant’s command decisions and actions shows how his determined leadership relieved the siege and shattered the enemy, resulting in the creation of a new strategic base of Union operations and Grant’s elevation to commander of all the Federal armies the following year.

Powell’s detailed exploration of the Union Army of the Cumberland’s six-week-long campaign for Chattanooga is complemented by his careful attention to the personal issues Grant faced at the time

and his relationships with his superiors and subordinates. Though unfamiliar with the tactical situation, the army, and its officers, Grant delivered another resounding victory. His success, explains Powell, was due to his tactical flexibility, communication with his superiors, perseverance despite setbacks, and dogged determination to win the campaign.

Through attention to postwar accounts, Powell reconciles the differences between what happened and the participants’ memories of the events. He focuses throughout on Grant’s controversial decisions, showing how they were made and their impact on the campaign. As Powell shows, Grant’s choices demonstrate how he managed to be a thoughtful, deliberate commander despite the fog of war.

David A. Powell, an expert on the battle of Chickamauga, is the author of nine books on the Civil War, including The Chickamauga Campaign trilogy as well as Battle above the Clouds: Lifting the Siege of Chattanooga and the Battle of Lookout Mountain, October 16–November 24, 1863. He is vice president of Airsped, Inc., a specialized delivery firm.

“In this engagingly written account of the Chattanooga campaign, Powell transitions seamlessly between the tactical and strategic levels of war, recounting the mud and blood of the battlefield as well as the rancor and resentment among the commanders.”

—Harry S. Laver, U.S. Army Command and General Staff School, author of A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant

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“David A. Powell concisely and insightfully demonstrates how Grant, with both persistence and flexibility, led troops from three different Union armies to gain a significant victory.”

—Sam Davis Elliott, author of John C. Brown of Tennessee: Rebel, Redeemer, and Railroader

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Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice Thomas F. Curran Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction

During the American Civil War, hundreds of women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area.

The majority of them were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, and sabotaging. By determining that women— who were excluded from the politics of the public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities implicitly acknowledged $26.50, 274 pages, 18 illustrations Paper: 978-0-8093-3803-0 E-book: 978-0-8093-3804-7

that they acted in ways that had serious political meaning.

In addition to analyzing the activities that led to arrests, the reactions women partisans evoked from the Federal authorities who confronted them, and the impact women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military prisons, Thomas F. Curran reveals how these women’s experiences were later disregarded in order to comport with a Lost Cause myth: the need for valiant men to protect defenseless women.

Thomas F. Curran has taught in the department of social studies at Cor Jesu Academy in St. Louis since 2003, and before that he taught at Saint Louis University and the University of Notre Dame. For eight years he served as managing editor of the Journal of Policy History. Curran is the author of Soldier of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement.

“Women Making War is an excellent piece of historical writing.”

—Stephanie McCurry, author of Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War

“Curran’s meticulous research adds new dimensions to our understanding of politics, loyalty, and gender in wartime. It is a must-read for anyone who wants a better understanding of the roles that women played during the Civil War.” —Jonathan W. White, author of Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War

“Anchored by a variety of entertaining and informative primary sources, Curran reminds us that there is still more to explore about female agency in directing the course of the Civil War.” —Victoria E. Ott, author of Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War

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Vicksburg Besieged

Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear The end of the Vicksburg Campaign and the forty-day siege In the first anthology to examine the Vicksburg Campaign’s final phase, nine prominent historians and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of previously unexamined aspects of the historic siege.

Ranging in scope from military to social history, the contributors’ invitingly written essays examine the role of Grant’s staff, the critical contributions of African American troops to the Union Army of the Tennessee, both sides’ use of sharpshooters and soldiers’ opinions about them, unusual nighttime activities between the Union siege lines and Confederate defensive positions, the use of West Point siege theory and the ingenuity of Midwestern $29.50, 200 pages, 16 illustrations Cloth: 978-0-8093-3783-5 E-book: 978-0-8093-3784-2 Civil War Campaigns in the West

soldiers in mining tunnels under the city’s defenses, the horrific experiences of civilians trapped in Vicksburg, the Louisiana soldier’s defense of Jackson amid the strains of piano music, and the effect of the campaign on Confederate soldiers from the Trans-Mississippi region.

Editors Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, along with their contributors—Andrew S. Bledsoe, John J. Gaines, Martin J. Hershock, Richard H. Holloway, Justin S. Solonick, Scott L. Stabler, and Jonathan M. Steplyk—give a rare glimpse into the often overlooked operations at the end of the most important campaign of the Civil War.

Steven E. Woodworth, a professor of history at Texas Christian University, has authored, coauthored, or edited more than thirty books on the Civil War era. Charles D. Grear, a professor of history at Central Texas College, has written extensively on Texas and the Civil War. Together they coedit the Civil War Campaigns in the West series.

Read more at www.siupress.com/cwcw

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New from the Concise Lincoln Library In this persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America.

With each chapter describing a particular influence, Morel leads readers from the Founding Father, George Washington; to the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and

Constitution; to the founding compromise over slavery; and finally to a consideration of how the original intentions of the Founding Fathers should be respected in light of experience, progress, and improvements over time. Within these key discussions, Morel shows that without the ideals of the American Revolution, Lincoln’s most famous speeches would be unrecognizable, and the character of the nation would have lost its foundation on the universal principles of human equality, individual liberty, and government by the consent of the governed.

Lucas E. Morel is a professor of politics and the head of the Politics Department at Washington $24.95, 176 pages Cloth: 978-0-8093-3785-9 E-book: 978-0-8093-3786-6

and Lee University, and an Honored Visiting Graduate Professor at Ashland University in Ohio.

His previous publications include Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages and Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government.

In this indispensable account of Abraham Lincoln’s earliest political years, Ron J. Keller reassesses Lincoln’s arguably lackluster legislative record during four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives to reveal how the underpinnings of his temperament, leadership skills, and political acumen were bolstered on the statehouse floor.

Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature details Lincoln’s early political platform and the grassroots campaigning that put him in office. Drawing on legislative records, newspaper accounts, speeches, letters, and other sources, Keller describes Lincoln’s positions on key bills, highlights his colleagues’ perceptions of him, and depicts the relationships that grew out of his statehouse $24.95, 176 pages, 8 illustrations Cloth: 978-0-8093-3700-2 E-book: 978-0-8093-3701-9

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interactions. Keller’s research delves into Lincoln’s popularity as a citizen of New Salem, his political alliances and victories, his antislavery stirrings, and his personal joys and struggles as he sharpened his political shrewdness.

Keller argues Lincoln’s definitive political philosophies—economic opportunity and the right to rise, democratic equality, and to a lesser extent his hatred of slavery—took root during his legislative tenure in Illinois. Situating Lincoln’s tenure and viewpoints within the context of national trends, Keller demonstrates that understanding Lincoln’s four terms as a state legislator is vital to understanding him as a whole.

Ron J. Keller is an associate professor of history and political science and the managing director

of the Abraham Lincoln Center for Character Development at Lincoln College. He is a coauthor of Abraham Lincoln in Logan County, Illinois, 1834–1860 and A Respect for the Office: Letters from the Presidents.

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Now in Paperback

“An excellent series of compact books. . . . I own all volumes and haven’t been disappointed by a single one of them.”

—Tom Peet, author of Reading Lincoln

“Reading SIU Press’s Concise Lincoln Library offers something for every thirst. Deep drinkers and first-time students of the Civil War and Lincoln studies will come back for more, and this series will more than fill the glass.”

—William Furry, executive director, Illinois State Historical Society

Available for Preorder

Read more and see the full list of titles at www.conciselincolnlibrary.com.

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