Abraham lincoln

In January 2008, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked Barack Obama which one book he would take with him to the White House, apart from the Bible. The eventual winner of the presidential election singled out Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 best-selling account of President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. In the […] Summary. Reprint: R0904C In January 2008, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked then-candidate Barack Obama what single book, apart from the Bible, he would bring with him to the White House. He cited Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War. It was a signal that Obama intended to model his leadership during the current crisis on the style of his presidential predecessor from Illinois. By bringing heavyweight politicians who are themselves past and future presidential contenders into his cabinet, Obama has indeed reprised Lincoln’s strategy of creating a team composed of his most able rivals. If the new U.S. president can learn from Lincoln so, too, can business executives now grappling with similar questions of how to lead in turbulent times. To draw out the lessons of Lincoln’s administration, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu interviewed Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian whose other books include No Ordinary Time (about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their era), The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. In their wide-ranging conversation, Go...

Houghton Mifflin In January 1841, a young Abraham Lincoln suffered his second breakdown. He collapsed, and was treated by a doctor who may have done him more harm than good. A new book explores how the Illinois lawyer went on to become president despite suffering from lifelong depression. Robert Siegel talks with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. "When you read the reminiscences of Lincoln's friends and you hear him described in their terms, he's always the most depressed person they've every seen. It's always this radical gloom that they were shocked by," Shenk says. Read an excerpt from the book's first chapter. The Community Said He Was Crazy In three key criteria -- the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset -- the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. Yet Lincoln's case is perfect, too, in a very different sense: it forces us to reckon with the limits of diagnostic categories and raises fundamental questions about the nature of illness and health. Though great resources in research and clinical science have been devoted to depression in the past few decades, we can neither cure it nor fully explain it. What we can do is describe its general characteristics. The perverse benefit of so much suffering is that we know a great deal about w...

Eight conspirators were tried by a military commission for Abraham Lincoln’s murder. David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt were found guilty and hanged, while Samuel A. Mudd, Michael O’Laughlen, and Samuel Arnold were sentenced to life imprisonment. Edman Spangler received a six-year sentence. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth On the morning of April 14, 1865, Booth—distraught over the collapse of the Confederacy—learned that the president would be Lewis Powell, a tall and powerful former Confederate soldier, with the attack on Seward, to be aided by pm) that night. In the event, Atzerodt failed to carry out his assignment and never approached Johnson. Powell invaded Seward’s home and slashed him repeatedly with a The assassination of Lincoln