The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform. Because senators at the time were elected by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, the majority of senators ow...
The habits of mind Roosevelt developed early in his academic career would serve him well throughout his life. As soon as he received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never l...
Flour and lumber. The entire settlement consisted of a few hundred people, fifteen log cabins, a tavern, a church, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a preacher, and a
National press. He called them by their first names, invited them
Precocious
Temporizing
We shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln’s repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.
Act like you’re talking to those folks, he counseled his students. Look one of them in the eye and then move on and look another one in the eye. During competitions, he utilized all his supple array o...
Admiral Dahlgren’s twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing...
An uncommon intuitive capacity and interpersonal intelligence allowed him as a child to read the intentions and desires of his parents, to react appropriately to shifting household moods—gifts that he...
As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted the larger world. Like Edith, Theodore filled pages of his letters with talk of authors and their creations....
As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.
Clay had been able, decade after decade, to quell rancor and bring opposing parties together in compromise. Time and again, he resisted extremes of opinion in both North and South. Whatever he did, he...
Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.
Elizabeth Blair of brother Frank: he could not let even a great man set his small dogs on him without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of the resentment.
From the time he had first spoken out against the extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be fairly...
Having hope, writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challen...
He then took his listeners back to their common beginnings, to the founding of the nation, unraveling a narrative to demonstrate that when the Constitution was adopted, the plain, unmistakable spirit...
How had Lincoln been able to lead these inordinately prideful, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, supremely gifted men to support a fundamental shift in the purpose of the war? The best answer can be fo...
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