Where to Watch Lincoln Before the War (2021)

Summary

One Day University presents a series of video lectures recorded in real-time from some of the top minds in the United States. Given by award-winning professors and experts in their field, these recorded lectures dive deep into the worlds of religion, government, literature, and social justice. Harold Holzer will present an overview of Abraham Lincoln's pre-presidential life and career through the lens of 19th-century partisan journalism, a world Lincoln inhabited with gusto and extraordinary results. Public sentiment is everything, he said a few years before he won the White House. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes and pronounces decisions. Lincoln really believed in this idea. From the outset, he tethered his ambitions to rise from obscurity to power, to the idea of mastering the press. This lecture will cover the full development of the early, pre-war Lincoln-even his courtship and marriage to Mary Todd (a courtship based on newspaper writing!)-but will strike an original chord by emphasizing what historians have long neglected: the importance of the press to politicians, readers, and voters throughout the nation during the volatile antebellum period.