Background
Holzer, Harold was born on February 5, 1949 in Brooklyn. Son of Charles and Rose (Last) Holzer.
(One of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lin...)
One of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union, examines the four months between Lincoln's election and inauguration, when the president-elect made the most important decision of his coming presidency -- there would be no compromise on slavery or secession of the slaveholding states, even at the cost of civil war. Abraham Lincoln first demonstrated his determination and leadership in the Great Secession Winter -- the four months between his election in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 -- when he rejected compromises urged on him by Republicans and Democrats, Northerners and Southerners, that might have preserved the Union a little longer but would have enshrined slavery for generations. Though Lincoln has been criticized by many historians for failing to appreciate the severity of the secession crisis that greeted his victory, Harold Holzer shows that the presidentelect waged a shrewd and complex campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery while vainly trying to limit secession to a few Deep South states. During this most dangerous White House transition in American history, the country had two presidents: one powerless (the president-elect, possessing no constitutional authority), the other paralyzed (the incumbent who refused to act). Through limited, brilliantly timed and crafted public statements, determined private letters, tough political pressure, and personal persuasion, Lincoln guaranteed the integrity of the American political process of majority rule, sounded the death knell of slavery, and transformed not only his own image but that of the presidency, even while making inevitable the war that would be necessary to make these achievements permanent. Lincoln President-Elect is the first book to concentrate on Lincoln's public stance and private agony during these months and on the momentous consequences when he first demonstrated his determination and leadership. Holzer recasts Lincoln from an isolated prairie politician yet to establish his greatness, to a skillful shaper of men and opinion and an immovable friend of freedom at a decisive moment when allegiance to the founding credo "all men are created equal" might well have been sacrificed.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743289471/?tag=2022091-20
(A stunning and definitive look at the best and most impor...)
A stunning and definitive look at the best and most important artworks of the Civil War era. Includes sweeping battlefield panoramas, grisly combat tableaux, camp scenes, and heroic portraiture of military leaders, all accompanied by a lively text that is as entertaining as it is informative. Full-color and black-and-white photographs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517584484/?tag=2022091-20
( From his cabinet's politics to his own struggles with de...)
From his cabinet's politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to say about the greatest of our Presidents. Lincoln Revisited is a masterly guide to what's new and what's noteworthy in this unfolding story- a brilliant gathering of fresh scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. Brought together by The Lincoln Forum, they tackle uncharted territory and emerging questions; they also take a new look at established debates-including those about their own landmark works. Here, these well-known historians revisit key chapters in Lincoln's legacy-from Matthew Pinsker on Lincoln's private life and Jean Baker on religion and the Lincoln marriage to Geoffrey Perret on Lincoln as leader and Frank J. Williams on Lincoln and civil liberties in wartime. The eighteen original essays explore every corner of Lincoln's world- religion and politics, slavery and sovereignty, presidential leadership and the rule of law, the Second Inaugural Address and the assassination. In his 1947 classic, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Herbert Donald confronted the Lincoln myth. Today, the scholars in Lincoln Revisited give a new generation of students, scholars, and citizens the perspectives vital for understanding the constantly reinterpreted genius of Abraham Lincoln.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823227375/?tag=2022091-20
( Chronicling the private lives of the Lincolns through t...)
Chronicling the private lives of the Lincolns through their personal photographic collection The Lincoln Family Album offers a rare and revealing glimpse into the private life of Abraham Lincoln and the first family. Showcasing original and previously unpublished photographs collected and preserved by Mary Todd Lincoln and four generations of descendants, the volume includes pictures displayed in a family album when the Lincolns lived in the White House. Chronicled are the lives of the Lincolns’ three sons, including the tragic death of Willie in 1862, the rapid change of Tad during the war, and Robert’s marriage, children, and political career. Soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War, period figures such as Tom Thumb and Henry Ward Beecher, and even the family dog also graced the album that became the nucleus of the Lincolns’ personal collection. This updated edition, which provides both additional pictures and new introductory materials by renowned Lincoln scholars Mark E. Neely Jr. and Harold Holzer, paints a portrait of the Lincolns’ rise to prominence and the exclusion of poorer relations after the family moved to the nation’s capital. With 150 illustrations and detailed captions, this authoritative and enlightening nineteenth-century history also includes capsule biographies of the Lincolns’ friends and relatives. In such images as the First Lady in mourning or the assassin John Wilkes Booth, the pictures cannot disguise the painful truth about a family that suffered as many tragedies as triumphs. Willie’s death at the age of eleven abruptly ended Mary and Abraham’s personal collecting, but Lincoln descendants continued the tradition. The last pages of The Lincoln Family Album conclude with the death of Robert Lincoln’s last grandchild, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, in 1985, ending the direct line of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809327139/?tag=2022091-20
(His image today is part of America, from the penny to Mou...)
His image today is part of America, from the penny to Mount Rushmore, but in his own day Abraham Lincoln was as much reviled as he was revered, and he remained a controversial figure up to the time of his assassination. Now one of our preeminent authorities on Lincoln charts his rocky road from obscure western politician to national icon. In Lincoln Seen and Heard, Harold Holzer probes the development of Lincoln's image and reputation in his own time. He examines a vast array of visual and documentary sources to demonstrate the president's impact both on the public and on the historical imagination, enabling us to see the man from Illinois as his contemporaries saw him. Holzer considers a wide range of images-prints, portraits, political cartoons-to reveal what they say about Lincoln. He shows the ways in which Lincoln was depicted as Great Emancipator and as commander in chief, how he was assailed in cartoons from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, and how printmakers both memorialized and capitalized on his assassination. Sharing dozens of historic reproductions, Holzer writes with unabashed enthusiasm as he unravels the symbolic meaning and the message of these images and explains their relation to political and military events of the time. Holzer also takes a closer look at Lincoln's oratory, the words of a man often ridiculed for his homespun manner of speaking. He shows how Lincoln's choice of words in the Emancipation Proclamation was actually designed to minimize its humanitarianism and argues that the story of his failure at Gettysburg has been unfairly exaggerated. Through this provocative collection, Lincoln emerges not only as a leader dependent upon his public image but also as an active participant in its development. Lincoln Seen and Heard helps us distinguish man from myth, while offering a superb introduction to the work of one of our most provocative Lincoln scholars.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0700610014/?tag=2022091-20
(Gossip, tributes, and revelations about the president--fr...)
Gossip, tributes, and revelations about the president--from both his best friends and his worst enemies--are collected in this revealing insider's look at Abraham Lincoln.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002A7AVYQ/?tag=2022091-20
(A collection of letters written to Abraham Lincoln betwee...)
A collection of letters written to Abraham Lincoln between the years of 1860 and 1865 offers insight into a cultural and political era and contains both letters of hate and letters of admiration.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201408295/?tag=2022091-20
(Focusing on prints produced in Lincoln's lifetime and in ...)
Focusing on prints produced in Lincoln's lifetime and in the iconographically important months immediately following his death, this illustrated volume pairs original photographs and paintings with the prints made from them. It includes wartime cartoons, Lincoln family portraits and renderings of the moment of the shooting at Ford's Theatre.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0252069846/?tag=2022091-20
( The Emancipation Proclamation is the most important doc...)
The Emancipation Proclamation is the most important document of arguably the greatest president in U.S. history. Now, Edna Greene Medford, Frank J. Williams, and Harold Holzer -- eminent experts in their fields -- remember, analyze, and interpret the Emancipation Proclamation in three distinct respects: the influence of and impact upon African Americans; the legal, political, and military exigencies; and the role pictorial images played in establishing the document in public memory. The result is a carefully balanced yet provocative study that views the proclamation and its author from the perspective of fellow Republicans, antiwar Democrats, the press, the military, the enslaved, free blacks, and the antislavery white establishment, as well as the artists, publishers, sculptors, and their patrons who sought to enshrine Abraham Lincoln and his decree of freedom in iconography. Medford places African Americans, the people most affected by Lincoln's edict, at the center of the drama rather than at the periphery, as previous studies have done. She argues that blacks interpreted the proclamation much more broadly than Lincoln intended it, and during the postwar years and into the twentieth century they became disillusioned by the broken promise of equality and the realities of discrimination, violence, and economic dependence. Williams points out the obstacles Lincoln overcame in finding a way to confiscate property -- enslaved humans -- without violating the Constitution. He suggests that the president solidified his reputation as a legal and political genius by issuing the proclamation as Commander-in-Chief, thus taking the property under the pretext of military necessity. Holzer explores how it was only after Lincoln's assassination that the Emancipation Proclamation became an acceptable subject for pictorial celebration. Even then, it was the image of the martyr-president as the great emancipator that resonated in public memory, while any reference to those African Americans most affected by the proclamation was stripped away. This multilayered treatment reveals that the proclamation remains a singularly brave and bold act -- brilliantly calculated to maintain the viability of the Union during wartime, deeply dependent on the enlightened voices of Lincoln's contemporaries, and owing a major debt in history to the image-makers who quickly and indelibly preserved it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080713144X/?tag=2022091-20
(During the American Civil War, popular prints were freque...)
During the American Civil War, popular prints were frequently used to depict, define, and celebrate both the Union and Confederate causes. The Union Image explores the graphic arts that portrayed the Northern side--both in patriotic pictures and newsworthy illustrations published while the war raged and in retrospective images issued years later as major weapons in the postwar battle to shape the national memory. Created not for connoisseurs but for ordinary Americans, these engravings and lithographs depicted battles, commanders, life in camp and on campaign, the sacrifices of home and hearth, and an election campaign that roiled the North in the midst of the war. This volume reproduces nearly 150 original prints, allowing readers to trace changes in Northern public opinion, from Northerners' early high hopes for success to their appreciation for the ultimate victors, the "real men of war," Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807825107/?tag=2022091-20
( A recent conference on Lincoln at Gettysburg resulted i...)
A recent conference on Lincoln at Gettysburg resulted in this remarkable book of essays by distinguished Civil War scholars and Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, with an introduction by William C. Davis.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1882810376/?tag=2022091-20
(Winner of the Lincoln Prize Lincoln at Cooper Union expl...)
Winner of the Lincoln Prize Lincoln at Cooper Union explores Lincoln's most influential and widely reported pre-presidential address -- an extraordinary appeal by the western politician to the eastern elite that propelled him toward the Republican nomination for president. Delivered in New York in February 1860, the Cooper Union speech dispelled doubts about Lincoln's suitability for the presidency and reassured conservatives of his moderation while reaffirming his opposition to slavery to Republican progressives. Award-winning Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer places Lincoln and his speech in the context of the times -- an era of racism, politicized journalism, and public oratory as entertainment -- and shows how the candidate framed the speech as an opportunity to continue his famous "debates" with his archrival Democrat Stephen A. Douglas on the question of slavery. Holzer describes the enormous risk Lincoln took by appearing in New York, where he exposed himself to the country's most critical audience and took on Republican Senator William Henry Seward of New York, the front runner, in his own backyard. Then he recounts a brilliant and innovative public relations campaign, as Lincoln took the speech "on the road" in his successful quest for the presidency.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743299647/?tag=2022091-20
(The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in ...)
The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in the New York State Archives is a comprehensive reference work that, for the first time, makes available to a wide public one of the most important and extensive Civil War resources in the nation: the collections of the New York State Archives and Records Administration. The guide also seeks to make readers aware of the vast collections of wartime manuscripts, newspapers, maps, rare books, ephemera, and artifacts held by the New York State Museum, The New York State Library, and The New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs. Collectively, the holdings of these four institutions constitute one of the largest and most significant collections of Civil War materials available to the public. Unlike similar guides that have been published by other archival institutions, The Union Preserved contains eleven appendices that are intended to facilitate and further the research of those interested in New York's role in the Civil War. Much of the information contained in these appendices either has been long out of print or has never been published and should prove to be an invaluable source to researchers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823219003/?tag=2022091-20
(Highlighting the major events of one of American history'...)
Highlighting the major events of one of American history's most critical conflicts, this book presents accounts of Civil War battles, proclamations, victories and defeats, in the words of people who were there. The letters, speeches and anecdotes of both Union and Confederate soldiers give a wide-ranging vision of the terrifying battles waged. As well as writings by leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, there are letters sent home by front-line soldiers, providing a true-to-life portrait of the Civil War.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399522034/?tag=2022091-20
(Artist F. B. Carpenter's account of the Lincoln White Hou...)
Artist F. B. Carpenter's account of the Lincoln White House, which he witnessed while painting the First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, was first published in 1866. This new illustrated and indexed White House Historical Association reprint includes an introduction by Lincoln historian Harold Holzer.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FBBQP48/?tag=2022091-20
( A unique history of Lincoln's political rise, presidenc...)
A unique history of Lincoln's political rise, presidency, and death as reported by the nation's most respected newspaper, with introductions and additional perspectives from two eminent Lincoln historians The New York Times closely covered the political career and presidency of Abraham Lincoln: his political rise, the early years of his presidency, the Civil War, and his assassination and its aftermath--perhaps our nation's most critical and dramatic presidency. Lincoln in the Times includes coverage of the major events in Lincoln's political life, such as his campaign, his surprising election, and his inaugurals; the State of the Union addresses, the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation; the assassination and funeral. Edited and with introductions and supporting text by David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer, the book contains vintage photographs and illustrations of Lincoln and others close to him, in the White House and on the battlefields that he visited.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031234919X/?tag=2022091-20
historian writer museum and marketing executive
Holzer, Harold was born on February 5, 1949 in Brooklyn. Son of Charles and Rose (Last) Holzer.
Bachelor, City University of New York, Queens, 1969. Diploma (honorary), Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee, 1988. Diploma (honorary), Lincoln College, Illinois, 1992.
Diploma (honorary), Illinois College, Jacksonville, 2006. Diploma (honorary), University Mass, Dartmouth, 2006. Diploma, Bard College, 2009.
Editor Manhattan Tribune, New York City, 1969-1973. Director special projects Department Civic Affairs, 1973-1975. Press secretary to Congresswoman Bella Abzug, 1975-1977.
Communications specialist Secretary of State office, 1978. Director public affairs Station W National Educational Television (Public Broadcasting Service), New York City, 1978-1984. Vice president public affairs Javits Convention Center, 1984-1985.
Executive vice president public affairs Urban Development Corporation, State of New York, 1985-1992. Chief communications officer Metropolitan Museum Art, New York City, 1992-1996, vice president communications, 1996-2001, vice president communications and marketing, 2001—2005, senior vice president external affairs, since 2005.
( A unique history of Lincoln's political rise, presidenc...)
(One of our most eminent Lincoln scholars, winner of a Lin...)
(The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in ...)
(Winner of the Lincoln Prize Lincoln at Cooper Union expl...)
(Focusing on prints produced in Lincoln's lifetime and in ...)
(His image today is part of America, from the penny to Mou...)
( Chronicling the private lives of the Lincolns through t...)
(Highlighting the major events of one of American history'...)
( A recent conference on Lincoln at Gettysburg resulted i...)
(A collection of letters written to Abraham Lincoln betwee...)
(Gossip, tributes, and revelations about the president--fr...)
(First published in 1987, The Confederate Image examines t...)
(During the American Civil War, popular prints were freque...)
( From his cabinet's politics to his own struggles with de...)
( The Emancipation Proclamation is the most important doc...)
(A stunning and definitive look at the best and most impor...)
(Abraham Lincoln: Portrayed in the Collections of the Indi...)
(AZ Eperjesi Jogakademia Jovoje (1902))
(Artist F. B. Carpenter's account of the Lincoln White Hou...)
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Lecturer on Lincoln and Civil War. Co-organizer 5 exhibitions on Lincoln and Civil War. Trustee New York State Archives Partnership Trust, since 1994.
Member United States Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (appointed by President Clinton), 2000, co-chairman, 2001-2010, chairman Abraham Lincoln Cicentennial Foundation, since 2010. Member Abraham Lincoln Association (board directors 1988-1995, Achievement award 1991), Lincoln Group of New York (vice president 1979-1990, president 1990-1996, Achievement award 1988, 93, 05, 09, special award, 2010), State Council for Humanities (board directors 1991-1993), Ulysses S. Grant Association (board directors since 1996), The Lincoln Forum (vice chairman since 1996).
Married Edith Spiegel, February 27, 1971. Children: Remy, Meg.