The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln, from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation. From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. In the "fascinating" (Booklist, starred review) A Self-Made Man, Sidney Blumenthal reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Yet he was a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. His marriage to the upper class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career. "The Lincoln of Blumenthal's pen is...a brave progressive facing racist assaults on his religion, ethnicity, and very legitimacy that echo the anti-Obama birther movement....Blumenthal takes the wily pol of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and goes deeper, finding a Vulcan logic and House of Cards ruthlessness" (The Washingtonian). Based on prodigious research of Lincoln's record, and of the period and its main players, Blumenthal's robust biography reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. This first volume traces Lincoln from his birth in 1809 through his education in the political arts, rise to the Congress, and fall into the wilderness from which he emerged as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. "Splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man...without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." (Washington Monthly).

Lincoln's incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed in this "compelling, original, and elegantly written" (Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author) third volume of the "magisterial" (The New York Times Book Review) Political Life of Abraham Lincoln series, following A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel. After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party's nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political savvy and determination. This is Abraham Lincoln, who indisputably becomes the greatest president and moral leader in the nation's history. But he must first build a new political party, brilliantly state the anti-slavery case and overcome shattering defeat to win the presidency. In the years of civil war to follow, he will show mightily that the nation was right to bet on him. He was its preserver, a politician of moral integrity. All the Powers of Earth is "as essential as any political biography is likely to be" and Sidney Bluementhal is "the definitive chronicler of Lincoln's political career" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

The "magisterial" (The New York Times Book Review) second volume of Sidney Blumenthal's acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president's genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln seems condemned to political isolation and defeat. His Whig Party is broken in the 1852 election, and disintegrates. His perennial rival, Stephen Douglas, forges an alliance with the Southern senators and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Violent struggle breaks out on the plains of Kansas, a prelude to the Civil War. Lincoln rises to the occasion. Only he can take on Douglas in Illinois. He finally delivers the dramatic speech that leaves observers stunned. In 1855, he makes a race for the Senate against Douglas, which he loses when he throws his support to a rival to prevent the election of a proslavery candidate. In Wrestling With His Angel, Sidney Blumenthal explains how Lincoln and his friends operate behind the scenes to destroy the anti-immigrant party in Illinois to clear the way for a new Republican Party. Lincoln takes command and writes its first platform and vaults onto the national stage as the leader of a party that will launch him to the presidency. The Washington Monthly hailed Blumenthal's Volume I as, "splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter hailed Volume II as "dramatic narrative history, prophetic and intimate." Wrestling With His Angel brings Lincoln from the wilderness to the peak of his career as he is determined to enter into the battle for the nation's soul and to win it for democracy.

"Liberty and the News" is Walter Lippman's classic account of how the press threatens democracy whenever it has an agenda other than the free flow of ideas. Arguing that there is a necessary connection between liberty and truth, Lippman excoriates the press, claiming that it exists primarily for its own purposes and agendas and only incidentally to promote the honest interplay of facts and ideas. In response, Lippman sought to imagine a better way of cultivating the news.

A brilliant essay on a persistent problem of American democracy, "Liberty and the News" is still powerfully relevant despite the development of countless news sources unimagined when Lippman first published it in 1920. The problems he identifies--the self-importance of the press, the corrosion of rumors and innuendo, and the spinning of the news by political powers--are still with us, and they still threaten liberty. By focusing on the direct and necessary connection between liberty and truth, Lippmann's work helps to clarify one of the most pressing predicaments of American democracy today.

Abraham Lincoln had a lifelong fascination with science and technology, a fascination that would help institutionalize science, win the Civil War, and propel the nation into the modern age. Readers will learn through Lincoln: The Fire of Genius how science and technology gradually infiltrated Lincoln's remarkable life and influenced his growing desire to improve the condition of all men. The book traces this progression from a simple farm boy to a president who changed the world. Counter to conventional wisdom, subsistence farming provides a considerable education in agronomic science, forest ecology, hydrology, and even a little civil engineering. Continuing through a lifetime of self-study, curiosity, and hard work, Lincoln became the only President with a patent, advocated for technological advancement as a legislator in Illinois and in Washington, and became the "go-to" western lawyer on technology, and patent cases during his legal career. During the Civil War, Lincoln drew upon his commitment to science and personally encouraged inventors while taking dramatic steps to institutionalize science via the Smithsonian Institution, create the National Academy of Sciences, and initiate the Department of Agriculture. Lincoln's insistence on high-tech weaponry, balloon surveillance, strategic use of telegraphy, and railroad deployment positioned the North to achieve Union victory.