Abraham Lincoln in 50 Objects: Episodes in the Life of Our Nation’s Greatest President

The man behind the monument, revealed through the objects of his life and legend.

More than 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Yet Thomas A. Horrocks finds a fresh and revealing way to encounter the sixteenth president: through the objects that shaped, recorded, promoted, burdened, and mythologized his life.

Abraham Lincoln in 50 Objects is an intimate, visually rich biography told through fifty tangible touchstones, drawn from major museums, libraries, archives, and private collections. A grammar book evokes Lincoln’s fierce self-education. A survey map opens onto his restless young adulthood. A stovepipe hat becomes both personal trademark and practical working tool. A pen carries the weight of emancipation. Campaign images, political documents, household objects, relics of assassination, and artifacts of mourning reveal how Lincoln became, in life and death, both a man and an American legend.

Horrocks does not use these objects as illustrations to a familiar story. He builds vivid historical episodes around them, restoring physical texture to a figure too often reduced to marble, myth, and quotation. Here is Lincoln as reader, lawyer, husband, politician, commander in chief, writer, emancipator, martyr, and secular saint.

Unsentimental, accessible, and deeply informed, Abraham Lincoln in 50 Objects brings readers close to the material world of Lincoln’s life—and to the complicated human being whose words, choices, and image continue to shape our true American dream.