Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration

＂From acclaimed Abraham Lincoln historian Harold Holzer, a groundbreaking account of Lincoln’s grappling with the politics of immigration against the backdrop of the Civil War. In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and--perhaps most significantly--voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape, and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry. Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war would make clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society＂--

Harold Holzer is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln. Educated at the City University of New York, he served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S. Abzug and Governor Mario Cuomo, and was a Senior Vice President at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A prolific writer and lecturer, Holzer co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama. He is now serves as the director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.