While progressives and conservatives argue over his legacy, a sprawling new biography explains "Abe" via the surprisingly rich culture that forged him.
However much Americans boasted about the superiority of their republican political institutions in the Victorian Era, we never managed to escape the accusation that our politics had been bought at the price of cultural inferiority. “The Americans are a brave, industrious and acute people,” conceded Sydney Smith, the British clergyman and critic, but “who reads an American book? Or goes to an...
