Brought Forth on This Continent
Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Descrição da editora
From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War.
In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.
Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.
Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Holzer (A Just and Generous Nation) offers an elegant examination of Abraham Lincoln's political evolution on the contentious issue of immigration. Chronicling the "seismic political realignment, cultural upheaval, and personal growth" that led to Lincoln openly encouraging immigration and making it a "policy priority" in an historic November 1863 address to Congress, Holzer explains how Lincoln's proposal resulted in the "first piece of proactive federal legislation" supporting immigration, which would also be the last of its kind until 1965. Holzer is balanced in his estimation of Lincoln's statements and actions during the years preceding the Civil War, when "poisonous" ethnic tensions flared: he faults Lincoln for "dallying with deplorable nativists" to gain a political edge, but acknowledges a "signal moral achievement" in Lincoln's "consistent revulsion for the hatred of Catholics and foreigners." Adding texture to Holzer's political analysis are profiles of the president's foreign-born close associates, mainly Germans, like Carl Schurz (the first German-born American elected senator) and Lincoln's private secretary John Nicolay. (Lincoln's relationship to the primarily Democratic-voting Irish community was thornier, particularly given his persistent use of ethnic humor—Holzer provides some off-color examples from Lincoln's "trove of Irish stories.") This robust and lively account makes cogent connections between history and today's immigration policy that will resonate with a wide readership.