Lincoln's Body

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

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

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

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

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