Historians have written approximately 16,000 books about Abraham Lincoln, but there is still so much to learn about the man in his historical context. Lincoln wrote in 1864, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
In this course, we examine the times in which Lincoln lived and how they helped make this famous American, focusing on the imperialism of the American republic, capitalist transformation, and the struggle over slavery and emancipation that caused and shaped the contours of the Civil War.