Think Anew Act Anew

In the hope of shedding light on questions that continue to spark debate among historians and students of Lincoln, Brooks Simpson presents Think Anew, Act Anew, a concise and inventively annotated collection of documents written by Abraham Lincoln that focus on the interrelated themes of slavery, union, emancipation, and reconstruction. How did Lincoln define equality? How did he harmonize his rejection of slavery as immoral with his toleration of it where it existed? What were his views on race, and did they change over time? What did freedom mean to him? This unique selection of Lincoln's own words offers readers a chance to explore for themselves how Lincoln understood the prevailing concerns of his America. Professor Simpson provides contextual information in introductions to each of the book's eight chapters and all sixty-four documents are preceded by a brief note.

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America’s addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin into dangerous abstraction. Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the collective American memory, but what distinguishes Ersatz America is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history, citizen artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist outside the realm of official language, creating a counter narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human history.

Beginning in the 1970s evangelical Christians decided to become involved in our nation's political life by becoming Republican partisans. Today they are widely considered the Republican Party's most reliable constituency. In the process American politics has become more bitter, chaotic, divisive, and now dysfunctional. There is a significant bipartisan consensus that the Republican Party bears the most responsibility for the state of our nation's politics. This is not an endorsement of Democratic policies, only an assessment of why our government no longer gets anything done. What is often ignored, though, is the role evangelicals are playing in what is happening. This book connects the dots between evangelical theology and evangelical politics. The key factor in both is their "no compromise" attitude that sees negotiations as a betrayal of moral principles, confident as they are that they are doing God's work here on earth. The result, as this book shows, is bad politics and bad religion, both of which are out of step with the views of most Americans. It concludes with suggestions for what the nation and evangelicals themselves can do to open the door to our government being able to function again, and to the nation healing some of its divisions.