His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation
By Diana Schaub
JMC faculty partner Diana Schaub has recently written a book, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation. It’s due for release in November 2021:
An expert analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s three most powerful speeches reveals his rhetorical genius and his thoughts on our national character.
Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, believed that our national character was defined by three key moments: the writing of the Constitution, our declaration of independence from England, and the beginning of slavery on the North American continent. His thoughts on these landmarks can be traced through three speeches: the Lyceum Address, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural. The latter two are well-known, enshrined forever on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. The former is much less familiar to most, written a quarter century before his presidency, when he was a 28 year-old Illinois state legislator.
In His Greatest Speeches, Professor Diana Schaub offers a brilliant line-by-line analysis of these timeless works, placing them in historical context and explaining the brilliance behind their rhetoric. The result is a complete vision of Lincoln’s worldview that is sure to fascinate and inspire general readers and history buffs alike. This book is a wholly original resource for considering the difficult questions of American purpose and identity, questions that are no less contentious or essential today than they were over two hundred years ago.
Pre-order now from Macmillan Publishers or Amazon >>
Diana Schaub is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a New Atlantis contributing editor, and a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jill and Boyd Smith Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. From 2004 to 2009, she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. Dr. Schaub is the author of His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation (forthcoming), Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, and co-editor (with Amy and Leon Kass) of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. Her work has appeared in the New Atlantis, National Affairs, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, The American Enterprise, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, The American Interest, and City Journal. Dr. Schaub earned an A.B. from Kenyon College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Professor Schaub is a JMC faculty partner.
Learn more about Diana Schaub >>
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