Allen C. Guelzo – författare

"...a monumental work of reclamation and revival...The Golden Thread comes as a history, an argument, a treasure hoard." —The Wall Street JournalA sweeping, resource-rich history of the ancient world and Christendom—designed for students and lifelong learners alike, and faithful to the enduring legacy of the Western tradition. This is Volume I of a two-part series tracing the story of Western civilization from antiquity to the modern age.The Western Tradition from Antiquity to 1500Where do the threads that form the Western tradition originate, and how were they woven together over the two and a half millennia before 1500? What are the sources of our modern ideas about science, freedom, equality, law, good government, and virtue? These are the questions explored in The Golden Thread, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom, written by James Hankins.The story begins with the seminal culture of the classical Greeks and moves through the Hellenization of the east following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Hankins then narrates the rise and dominance of Rome and the fusion of Greco-Roman and Judea-Christian cultures in the Christian empire of the fourth century AD. The volume follows the history of Christendom from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, charts its centuries-long rivalry with the Islamic world, and culminates in the emergence of European civilization in the Middle Age and Renaissance. Volume I Examines how the foundations were laid for the West's political and economic dominance in the modern era, illuminating the deep roots of the ideas, arts, and institutions that continue to shape our world.The Golden Thread is a two-volume history of the Western tradition. Volume I is authored by James Hankins; Volume II, covering the modern and contemporary West, is authored by Allen C. Guelzo.The Golden Thread series features:The Vision of Two AuthorsWritten by two of the most distinguished historians of our time.The Golden Thread speaks in coherent, singular voices. Each volume is authored by an eminent individual writing in narrative form and interpretive tone, and animated by the conviction that knowledge across disciplines is best pursued through stories that are rich in insight, humanity, and meaning.A Cultural InheritanceNearly 1000 curated images—sculptures, paintings, and artifacts—from the vaults of the West’s finest cultural institutions.Readers are not merely told what happened, but shown what was created—page after page alive with the rich architecture, sculpture, music, and painting that gave visible form to the West’s most enduring aspirations.Living Voices from the Distant PastFeatures close to 200 foundational primary source texts drawn from every era.Woven through the chapters are the voices that once commanded nations, composed poems and hymns, and drafted creeds. These are not summaries or paraphrases—they are the words themselves, as they were first spoken, sung, and inscribed.Visual Histories of the WorldEnriched by over 150 bespoke maps, each a visual key to the unfolding story of the West.The Golden Thread does more than locate events—it reconstructs the shifting boundaries of thought, faith, empire, and imagination that defined how men and women once pictured the world and their place within it.

The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the "black codes," would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. However, these failures cannot obscure a number of accomplishments with long-term consequences for American life, among them the Civil Rights Act, the election of the first African American representatives to Congress, and the avoidance of renewed civil war. Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement. In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric.

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents.If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of seven problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, and reconciliation. The book sets these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction--"the pursuit of happiness"--remains a fundamental dilemma even today.Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, "lived in the mind." Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property. The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American history and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes. Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a liberal democracy could survive the most frightful of challenges.In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader's vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture. Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South. Written by a leading authority on our nation's most searing crisis, Fateful Lightning offers a vivid and original account of an event whose echoes continue with Americans to this day.

The larger-than-life image Abraham Lincoln projects across the screen of American history owes much to his role as the Great Emancipator during the Civil War. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln’s identity is precisely the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. In a vigorous defense of America’s sixteenth president, award-winning historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo refutes accusations of Lincoln’s racism and political opportunism, while candidly probing the follies of contemporary cynicism and the constraints of today’s unexamined faith in the liberating powers of individual autonomy.Redeeming the Great Emancipator enumerates Lincoln’s anti-slavery credentials, showing that a deeply held belief in the God-given rights of all people steeled the president in his commitment to emancipation and his hope for racial reconciliation. Emancipation did not achieve complete freedom for American slaves, nor was Lincoln entirely above some of the racial prejudices of his time. Nevertheless, his conscience and moral convictions far outweighed political calculations in ultimately securing freedom for black Americans.Guelzo clarifies the historical record concerning what the Emancipation Proclamation did and did not accomplish. As a policy it was imperfect, but it was far from ineffectual, as some accounts of African American self-emancipation imply. To achieve liberation required interdependence across barriers of race and status. If we fail to recognize our debt to the sacrifices and ingenuity of all the brave men and women of the past, Guelzo says, then we deny a precious part of the American and, indeed, the human community.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy's viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln's most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation's leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln's political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln's earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

"The way Guelzo weaves faith, liberty, reason, and historical complexity into a coherent and accessible story creates a rich and thoughtful exploration of Western civilization that feels both rigorous and deeply human." —Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesA compelling, resource-rich history of the modern West—from the Renaissance to the present—designed for students and lifelong learners alike, and grounded in the enduring ideals of liberty, faith, and reason. This is Volume II of a two-part series tracing the story of Western civilization from antiquity to the modern age.The Western Tradition from 1500 to the PresentWith the Renaissance in Europe, the Western world experienced a long series of cataclysmic events that still reverberate in modern society. Written by Allan C. Guelzo, The Golden Thread, Volume II: The Modern and Contemporary West begins in 1500, when the Protestant Reformation brought an end of the Roman Catholic Church's dominance over European states. It then turns to the rise of imperial powers that swiftly circled the globe, and to the explosion of intellectual, economic, and technological advancements sparked by the Enlightenment. These were moments of flourishing in Western civilization, but also moments of uncertainty, as they portended the violent political upheavals that shook continental Europe and the Americas during the American, French and Bolivarian Revolutions as well as the Napoleonic Wars. The Industrial Revolution, the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment, and a second wave of scientific advancement in the nineteenth century challenged any attempt to restore the classical unity of the West. A radically redrawn world emerged from these developments, one that was ill-prepared for the colossal physical and moral shocks of the First and Second World Wars.In its closing chapters, Guelzo explores how Western civilization has, in our own time, been simultaneously challenged by secular totalitarianism and yet remained remarkably resilient laying the foundations for material prosperity around the globe. Through the paradoxes of the twentieth century, The Golden Thread engages with the most significant questions facing the West today.The Golden Thread is a two-volume history of the Western tradition. Volume I is authored by James Hankins; Volume II, covering the modern and contemporary West, is authored by Allen C. Guelzo.The Golden Thread series features:The Vision of Two AuthorsWritten by two of the most distinguished historians of our time.The Golden Thread speaks in coherent, singular voices. Each volume is authored by an eminent individual writing in narrative form and interpretive tone, and animated by the conviction that knowledge across disciplines is best pursued through stories that are rich in insight, humanity, and meaning.A Cultural InheritanceNearly 1000 curated images—sculptures, paintings, and artifacts—from the vaults of the West’s finest cultural institutions.Readers are not merely told what happened, but shown what was created—page after page alive with the rich architecture, sculpture, music, and painting that gave visible form to the West’s most enduring aspirations.Living Voices from the Distant PastFeatures close to 200 foundational primary source texts drawn from every era.Woven through the chapters are the voices that once commanded nations, composed poems and hymns, and drafted creeds. These are not summaries or paraphrases—they are the words themselves, as they were first spoken, sung, and inscribed.Visual Histories of the WorldEnriched by over 150 bespoke maps, each a visual key to the unfolding story of the West.The Golden Thread does more than locate events—it reconstructs the shifting boundaries of thought, faith, empire, and imagination that defined how men and women once pictured the world and their place within it.

The Golden Thread Volume One: The Ancient World and Christendom. Beginning with the seminal culture of the classical Greeks and the Hellenic expansion, followed by the rise and dominance Rome and the emergence of medieval Christendom, before culminating with the Renaissance, Volume One explores the unfolding of early Western history, laying the foundation for the complex historical narratives that arise during the modern period.