Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power

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Crown, Oct 28, 2014 - Biography & Autobiography - 432 pages
A captivating look at how Abraham Lincoln evolved into one of our seminal foreign-policy presidents—and helped point the way to America’s rise to world power.
 
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 Continent’s great powers—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. Focusing on five distinct, intensely human conflicts that helped define Lincoln’s approach to foreign affairs—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—and bursting with colorful characters like Lincoln’s bowie-knife-wielding minister to Russia, Cassius Marcellus Clay; the cunning French empress, Eugénie; and the hapless Mexican monarch Maximilian, Lincoln in the World draws a finely wrought portrait of a president and his team at the dawn of American power.
 
Anchored by meticulous research into overlooked archives, Lincoln in the World reveals the sixteenth president to be one of America’s indispensable diplomats—and a key architect of America’s emergence as a global superpower. Much has been written about how Lincoln saved the Union, but Lincoln in the World highlights the lesser-known—yet equally vital—role he played on the world stage during those tumultuous years of war and division.
 

Contents

PROLOGUE
1
Lincoln vs Herndon
17
Lincoln vs Seward
60
Lincoln vs Palmerston
120
Lincoln vs Marx
170
Lincoln vs Napoleon
224
Lincoln vs Lincoln
296
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
311
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
387
INDEX
407
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

Kevin Peraino is a veteran foreign correspondent who has reported from around the world. A senior writer and bureau chief at Newsweek for a decade, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for foreign reporting and part of a team that won the National Magazine Award in 2004. He is the author of Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and The Dawn of American Power.

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