Kevin Peraino
A captivating look at how Abraham Lincoln evolved into one of our seminal foreign-policy presidentsâ€”and helped point the way to Americaâ€™s rise to world power., ,This is the story of one of the most breathtaking feats in the annals of American foreign policyâ€”performed by one of the most unlikely figures. Abraham Lincoln is not often remembered as a great foreign-policy president. He had never traveled overseas and spoke no foreign languages. And yet, during the Civil War, Lincoln and his team skillfully managed to stare down the Continentâ€™s great powersâ€”deftly avoiding European intervention on the side of the Confederacy. In the process, the United States emerged as a world power in its own right. , ,Engaging, insightful, and highly original, Lincoln in the World is a tale set at the intersection of personal character and national power. The narrative focuses tightly on five distinct, intensely human conflicts that helped define Lincolnâ€™s approach to foreign affairsâ€”from his debate, as a young congressman, with his law partner over the conduct of the Mexican War, to his deadlock with Napoleon III over the French occupation of Mexico. Bursting with colorful characters like Lincolnâ€™s bowie-knife-wielding minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay; the cunning French empress, EugÃ©nie; and the hapless Mexican monarch Maximilianâ€”Lincoln in the World draws a finely wrought portrait of a president and his team at the dawn of American power. , ,In the Age of Lincoln, we see shadows of our own world. The international arena in the 1860s could be a merciless moral vacuum. Lincolnâ€™s times demanded the cold, realistic pursuit of national interest, and, in important ways, resembled our own increasingly multipolar world. And yet, like ours, Lincolnâ€™s era was also an information age, a period of rapid globalization. Steamships, telegraph wires, and proliferating new media were transforming the world. Global influence required the use of â€œsoft powerâ€ as well as hard., ,Anchored by meticulous research into overlooked archives, Lincoln in the World reveals the sixteenth president to be one of Americaâ€™s indispensable diplomatsâ€”and a key architect of Americaâ€™s emergence as a global superpower. Much has been written about how Lincoln saved the Union, but Lincoln in the World highlights the lesser-knownâ€”yet equally vitalâ€”role he played on the world stage during those tumultuous years of war and division.
History,Biography,Nonfiction,Military History,Civil War,North American Hi...,American History,Historical,American History,American Civil War,Politics,Literature,American,Literature,19th Century
Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power