A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An innovative account of Abraham Lincoln, constitutional thinker and doer Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution—a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact—a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text—a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. The Broken Constitution is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them—and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. Includes 8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations

In a book that William E. Leuchtenburg, writing in the Atlantic, called “a work of considerable power,” Allen Matusow documents the rise and fall of 1960s liberalism. He offers deft treatments of the major topics—anticommunism, civil rights, Great Society programs, the counterculture—making the most, throughout, of his subject’s tremendous narrative potential. Matusow’s preface to the new edition explains the sometimes critical tone of his study. The Unraveling of America, he says, “was intended as a cautionary tale for liberals in the hope that when their hour struck again, they might perhaps be fortified against past error. Now that they have another chance, a look back at the 1960s might serve them well.”

Why does the Civil War still speak to us so powerfully? If we listen to the most thoughtful, forceful, and passionate voices of that day we find that many of the questions at the heart of that conflict are also central to the very idea of America—and that many of them remain unresolved in our own time. The Political Thought of the Civil War offers us the opportunity to pursue these questions from a new, critical perspective as leading scholars of American political science, history, and literature engage in some of the crucial debates of the Civil War era—and in the process illuminate more clearly the foundation and fault lines of the American regime. The essays in this volume use practical dilemmas of the Civil War to reveal and probe fundamental questions about the status of slavery and race in the American founding, the tension between moralism and constitutionalism, and the problem of creating and sustaining a multiracial society on the basis of the original principles of the American regime. Adopting a deliberative approach, the authors revisit the words and deeds of the most important political actors of era, from William Lloyd Garrison, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln to Alexander Stephens and Frederick Douglass, with reference to the American Founders and the architects of Reconstruction. The essays in this volume consider the difficult choices each of these figures made, the specific problems they were responding to, and the consequences of those choices. As this book exposes and explores the theoretical principles at play within their historical context, it also offers vivid reminders of how the great controversies surrounding the Civil War continue to shape American political life to this day.

Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920

This is the powerful story of a divine experiment to create a world based on love called Earth, designed to be a reflection of creation itself. A key focus of this experiment was to create a nation with a government of the people, by the people and for the people: The United States of America. The story of that experiment is told through the lives of three proxies serving creation. Two of the proxies are human; the third became an Ascended Master, St Germain, humanity's guide during this new 2000-year spiritual age of Aquarius. All three aspire to the same mission: that the United States and the entire world become full expressions of love, peace, equality, harmony and balance--in essence, reflections of creation itself. Now America's divine mission appears to be threatened by dark forces seeking to destroy the democratic foundations upon which this nation was built. Discover how the same energetic forces that helped create this nation are beginning to integrate that original founding energy into the people to "Refound" America's original divine mission to bring We consciousness to every human being on planet Earth. "America is the hope of humanity. It is the way-shower for the rest of the world. The destiny of America reflects the oneness destiny of the world." St Germain.

The United States of America is similar to a computer: At one time, its hardware was new, its software worked well, and users respected the system. But the hardware has aged, malware has infected its circuits, and users have run amok. The entire country is locking up and crashing. There's only one solution: We must reboot the system--and we must do it now. Keith Simpson, a Navy veteran and former airline captain and labor union leader, shares a bold treatise that will bring the nation back to its previous glory in New Mayflower. It's not another rant focusing on what's wrong with the United States. It includes keen insights that are proactive, daring, disarming, and dangerous all at the same time--as well as the proposed text for several amendments that would restore the Constitution. At one time, our country was defined by freedom, prosperity, moral decency, and spiritual faith. Join the author as he looks to the Pilgrims, Founding Fathers, and some of our greatest statesmen and stateswomen to discover how we can get it back.