Across the country, individuals and organizations will gather to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth on February 12. Lincoln, as one of history’s most renowned U.S. presidents, inspired rebirth and unity that today often ignites a sense of pride in the progress that has been achieved over the last 150 years. For this momentous occasion, the Council and the Library have the unique privilege of presenting James McPherson, a leading expert on the sixteenth President and author of Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. In the context of his recently published book, this presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize winner will discuss the extraordinary strategy and wit that, despite Lincoln’s lack of prior military experience, made him generally recognized as one of the greatest presidents and commanders-in-chief of all time.

James McPherson, a bestselling presidential historian, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book Battle Cry of Freedom. He was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University during the 1960s when he began to notice parallels between national events and those that occurred during the abolitionist movement a century earlier. His dissertation about this subject, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, earned him the Anisfield-Wolf Award. To research for his later work, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, McPherson combed through 25,000 letters and diaries of Civil War soldiers on both the Confederate and Union sides. This piece won the Lincoln Prize. His latest book, Tried by War, was released in October of 2008.

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