In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation's
sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a "new birth of freedom."
Lincoln's Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted
to realize--or subvert--that promise over the past century and a half.
The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work
of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to
terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all three
topics.
The book opens with an essay by Richard Carwardine, who explores
Lincoln's distinctive sense of humor. Later in the volume, Stephen
Kantrowitz examines the limitations of Lincoln's Native American policy,
while James W. Loewen discusses how textbooks regularly downplay the
sixteenth president's antislavery convictions. Lawrence T. McDonnell
looks at the role of poor Blacks and whites in the disintegration of the
Confederacy. Eric Foner provides an overview of the
Constitution-shattering impact of the Civil War amendments. Essays by J.
William Harris and Jerald Podair examine the fate of Lincoln's ideas
about land distribution to freedpeople. Gregory P. Downs focuses on the
structural limitations that Republicans faced in their efforts to
control racist violence during Reconstruction. Adrienne Petty and Mark
Schultz argue that Black land ownership in the post-Reconstruction South
persisted at surprisingly high rates. Rhondda Robinson Thomas examines
the role of convict labor in the construction of Clemson University, the
site of the conference from which this book evolved. Other essays look
at events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Randall J.
Stephens analyzes the political conservatism of white evangelical
Christianity. Peter Eisenstadt uses the career of Jackie Robinson to
explore the meanings of integration. Joshua Casmir Catalano and Briana
Pocratsky examine the debased state of public history on the airwaves,
particularly as purveyed by the History Channel. Gavin Wright rounds out
the volume with a striking political and economic analysis of the
collapse of the Democratic Party in the South.
Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a far-reaching,
thought-provoking exploration of the unfinished work of democracy,
particularly as it pertains to the legacy of slavery and white supremacy
in America.
