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A skilled historian and a masterful storyteller himself, Thomas was widely regarded as the greatest Lincoln historian of his generation. With these essays, he combines historical depth with narrative grace in delineating Lincoln's qualities as a humorist, lawyer, and politician. From colorful tall tales to clever barbs aimed at political opponents, Lincoln clothed a shrewd wit in a homespun, backwoods vernacular. He used humor to defuse tension, illuminate a point, put others at ease--and sometimes for sheer fun. From an early reliance on broad humor and ridicule in speeches and on the stump, Lincoln's style shifted in 1854 to a more serious vein in which humor came primarily to elucidate an argument. "If I did not laugh occasionally I should die," he is said to have told his cabinet, "and you need this medicine as much as I do." Thomas brings his deep knowledge of Lincoln to essays on the great man's tumultuous career in Congress, his work as a lawyer, his experiences in the Courts, and his opinions of the South. A gracious survey of Lincoln's early biographers, particularly Ida Tarbell, stands alongside an appreciation of Harry Edward Pratt, a key figure in the early days of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Thomas also assesses Lincoln's use of language and the ongoing significance of the Gettysburg Address.

This diverse collection is enhanced by an introduction by Michael Burlingame, himself a leading biographer of Lincoln. Burlingame provides a balanced portrait of Thomas and his circuitous path toward writing history.

This collection spans forty years and brings together forty-one of Johnston's most important writings, including many rare and several previously unpublished selections. They include position papers, theoretical treatises, program notes, historical reflections, lectures, excerpts from interviews, and letters, and they cover a broad spectrum of concerns--from the technical exegesis of microtonality to the personal and the broadly humanistic. A discography of commercially available recordings of Johnston's music closes out the collection.

A primary source–rich account of the founding of the National Council for Black Studies, "Of Our New Day Begun" is both a personal and institutional story. Through a composite of personal recollection and historical research, author William M. King recounts the story of the people, events, and processes involved in the prelude, formation, and initiation of the council through the first five years of its existence. 

In "Of Our New Day Begun" King fuses two separate and distinct stories: the story of the creation and evolution of the Black Studies program at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the story of how the specific needs of that program—especially accreditation—led to the creation of the NCBS. For the first part of the story, King relies on Bertha Maxwell-Roddey's 1974 doctoral dissertation, supplemented with additional archival documents and conversations. The second part of the story is based primarily on King’s memories, files, and research as one of the founders of NCBS, supplemented by interviews; materials from the NCBS archives; local, regional, and national newspaper accounts; and additional secondary materials.

Part memoir and part institutional history, "Of Our New Day Begun" is also a story about how to build an institution during times of social change. A reconstruction of the sights, sounds, ideas, and birth pangs King witnessed and experienced and the meanings he has come to make of them, this work is a significant contribution to the story of race and race relations in the United States during the mid to late twentieth century.

One of Book Authority's 8 New African-American and Black Biography Books Shaping 2025 

In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.

The fraught and generative relationship between two postwar literary giants—revealed through a series of letters published for the first time in English.  

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) stands among the most vital voices of postwar German literature—an acclaimed poet and prose writer who also reshaped radio drama and opera. In 1958, a letter of admiration from the Swiss novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991), written after hearing Bachmann’s radio play The Good God of Manhattan, led to a meeting in Paris and the beginning of an intense, volatile love affair that would forever leave a mark on both their lives and work. Presented here for the first time in English, 299 letters written between 1958 and 1973 trace the arc of that relationship: long separations, the strain of two writers attempting to share a life, creative rivalry, sexual jealousy, and gendered tensions sharpened by a fifteen-year age gap. The correspondence ranges from everyday logistics to raw psychological insight, from passion and longing to bitterness, silence, and regret. The later letters, written as Bachmann’s health declined, expand to include friends, relatives, and key literary figures. First published in German in 2022, this correspondence overturned long-held myths about the two writers, revealing mutual influence, negotiated freedom, and a struggle to reconcile incompatible needs. Intimate and revelatory, these letters illuminate the fragile intersection of love, power, and creativity.

When J. Edgar Hoover declared Herbert Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in the United States,” the notorious FBI director misconstrued his true significance. In this first book-length biography of Aptheker (1915–2003), Gary Murrell provides a balanced yet unflinching assessment of the controversial figure who was at once a leading historian of African America, radical political activist, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois, and lifelong member of the American Communist Party. Although blacklisted at U.S. universities, Aptheker published dozens of books, including the groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) and the monumental seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He also edited four volumes of the correspondence and unpublished writings of Du Bois, an achievement that Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called “a milestone in the coming of age of Afro-American history.”

As Murrell shows, Aptheker the historian was inseparable from Aptheker the leading Communist Party intellectual, polemicist, and agitator. During the 1960s, his ability to rouse and inspire both black and white student radicals made him one of the few Old Leftists accepted by the New Left. Aptheker had joined the CPUSA during its heyday in the 1930s, convinced that only through the party's leadership could fascism be defeated and true liberation be achieved: he ended his affiliation five decades later in 1991 after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In an afterword, Bettina Aptheker adds to Murrell's narrative by illuminating her mother Fay's vital contributions to her father's work and by affirming the particularly devastating challenges of life in a family dedicated to radical political and social change.