Lincolns Body, Richard Wightman Fox
Lincolns Body, Richard Wightman Fox
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
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Lincoln's Body

Author: Richard Wightman Fox

Narrator: Pete Larkin

Unabridged: 12 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/09/2015


Synopsis

A groundbreaking, magisterial study that explains why, like Walt Whitman, we "love the President personally."

In a stunning feat of scholarship insight, and engaging prose, Lincoln's Body explores how a president ungainly in body and downright "ugly" of aspect came to mean so much to us. 

nineteenth-century African Americans felt deep affection for their "liberatpr" as a "homely" man who did not hold himself apart; Southerners felt a nostalgia for Abraham Lincoln as a humble "conciliator." Later, educators glorified Lincoln as a symbol of nationhood to help assimilate poor immigrants. Monument makers focused not only on the gigantic body but also on a nationalist "union," downplaying "emancipation."  Among both black and white liberals in the 1960s and 1970 Lincoln was derided or fell out of fashion. Recently, Lincoln has been embodied once again (as idealist and pragmatist) by outstanding historians, by self-identified Lincolnian president Barak Obama, and by actor Daniel Day-Lewis- all keeping Lincoln alive in a body of memory that speaks volumes about our nation. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bill on December 30, 2022

I’ve read some really excellent Lincoln books this year, some really awful ones, some that I thought were just okay and some that I thought really missed the mark. This one fell into the last category. I appreciate what Fox was trying to do here, but I just didn’t think it worked. As even Fox himsel......more

Goodreads review by Caroline on March 10, 2015

Whilst I found the connection to Lincoln's physical body throughout this book somewhat tenuous in places, as a exploration of Lincoln's cultural afterlife it was excellent. As Wrightman Fox points out, other US presidents have been respected, lauded, mourned, but no other is loved in the way that Li......more

Goodreads review by David on January 07, 2019

This cultural history deals with the public's fascination with Abraham Lincoln down through the last 150 years, his physical body as well as the interpretation of his presidency, from national hagiography to revisionism. It starts with a brief rundown of Lincoln's life and career and then explains h......more

Goodreads review by Ai on May 12, 2017

I was expecting to be totally uninterested in this book- I figured it was just another book about cultural memory around Lincoln, and like, I've read Merrill Peterson and Barry Watson so what more could be said? And admittedly, some sections of this book do read like those books--there were parts th......more

Goodreads review by Tyler on May 08, 2023

University of Southern California historian Richard Wightman Fox has offered a worthwhile look at the ways that Americans have remembered Abraham Lincoln since his passing. Ever since I wrote an essay on the memory of the Civil War during my time as an Auburn University graduate student, I have been......more