Advocates for books that matter.
Selected as a long list finalist for the 2015 National Book Awards for Nonfiction.
A Wall Street Journal Best Nonfiction Book of 2015
Winner of the 2016 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The prize was co-founded and endowed by businessmen and philanthropists of the Gilber Lehrman Institute of American History in New York and co-creators of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the largest private archives of documents and artifacts in the nation.
Winner of the 2016 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians.
“A stunning piece of research, based on an extraordinary range of materials often overlooked by traditional historians.”—Michael Burlingame, Wall Street Journal
“[A] lyrical and important new study.”—Jill Lepore, New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful and terrible, Hodes’s marvelously written story of the assassination fills the mind, heart and soul. People never forgot the event; this book is a page-turner that makes it all unforgettable again as it also explains how one shocking death illuminated so many others.”—David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
“There are many books on the Lincoln assassination and the public response to it. But Martha Hodes’s work is the first to focus in great detail on the responses of ordinary individuals, Northern and Southern, white and black, soldiers and civilians, women and men, in their diaries and personal correspondence, and to blend such response into the larger story of public events. The amount of research is simply staggering. This is a highly original, lucidly written, book.”—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
“Mourning Lincoln is an original and important book that traces various reactions to Lincoln’s assassination. Through extensive research, Martha Hodes has discovered voices that are both moving and surprising. The result is an illuminating work that allows us for the first time to understand fully the meaning of Lincoln’s death at the time.”—Louis P. Masur, author of Lincoln's Hundred Days