Recommendations from our site
“Jean Baker sets a great example for biographers. It’s not that she used a lot of new sources; there was just abundant new insight. Baker makes you recognise how Mary Lincoln was demonised in her own day and how that served the purposes of her husband’s opponents. They knew how popular Abraham Lincoln was and that his wife was the only way to attack him. In Jean Baker’s book we are able to see Mary Todd Lincoln as a woman, not a liability. She was well read, she was passionate, she was polemical, and yes she struggled with depression and perhaps paranoia. It’s fair and it’s accurate. It’s the most analytic biography ever written of Mary Lincoln.” Read more...
The Best Books about First Ladies
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Biographer
Our most recommended books
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The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam -
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
by Bernard Bailyn -
To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War
by Tera Hunter -
What It Takes
by Richard Ben Cramer -
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’ Brien -
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
by Barbara Ransby
