The Lincoln Image: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE POPULAR PRINT [Hardcover]

Harold Holzer (Author), Gabor S. Boritt (Author), Jr., Mark E. Neely (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2001

"The Lincoln Image" documents how popular prints helped make Lincoln's a household face, deliberately crafting the image of a man of the people, someone with whom an ordinary American could identify. Featuring the work of Currier and Ives, John Sartain, and other artists and printmakers, this lavishly illustrated volume pairs original photographs and paintings with the prints made from them. That juxtaposition shows how printmakers reworked the original images to refine Lincoln's appearance. In several prints, his image replaces those of earlier politicians (the nineteenth-century equivalent of being "airbrushed in"); in others, a beard has been added to images that originally appeared clean-shaven. Focusing on prints produced in Lincoln's lifetime and in the iconographically important months immediately following his death, "The Lincoln Image" also includes wartime cartoons, Lincoln family portraits (most of which appeared after the assassination), and renderings of the fateful moment of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. In addition to discussing the prints themselves, prominent Lincoln scholars Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely Jr. examine the political environment of the nineteenth century that sustained a market for political prints, showing how politics offered spectacle, ritual, and amusement to a nation without organized sports and with only a rudimentary entertainment industry. A fascinating examination of the relationship between Lincoln's image, the printmakers' craft, and the political culture that helped shape them both, "The Lincoln Image" documents how printmakers both chronicled and shaped Lincoln's transfiguration into an American icon.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A feast for both eye and mind, belongs in every library. -- Choice

Absorbing and entertaining. -- New Yorker

Superbly researched and splendidly written . . . a model for further study of Lincoln as an artifact of American popular culture. -- Roger A. Fischer, Civil War History

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (February 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252026691
• ISBN-13: 978-0252026690
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,443,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An original and highly recommended work, July 4, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lincoln Image: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE POPULAR PRINT (Hardcover)

Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neeley Jr. effectively collaborate to present The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln And The Popular Print. Their work, profusely enhanced with period photographs (as well as iconography immediately following his assassination) documenting how popular prints served to make Lincoln's image of the popular and political culture of his day. An original and highly recommended work, The Lincoln Image is a impressive study of painstaking and exhaustive scholarship that will be greatly appreciated by academia, Lincoln studies supplemental curriculum reading lists, and students of 19th Century American political history.