Non-Fiction: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln

Lectures and conversations with historians, authors, and thinkers.

In Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln, award-winning historian Saladin Ambar unearths the horrors that shaped a young Abraham Lincoln’s worldview, pushing him to find his political voice. Murder on the Mississippi tells the story of three racially motivated murders in Mississippi River towns from 1835 to 1838 that inspired the speech that put Lincoln on the national map—the Lyceum Address. Confronted by lawlessness, racial terror, and his own inner demons, Lincoln’s battle was political and deeply personal.

Saladin Ambar is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. He is the winner of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Best Book Award in Government and Politics for Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, and his Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era is in development for a feature film. He is Co-Director of the Democracy Committee for New Jersey’s Reparations Council and was a contributor for the Lincoln Presidential Foundation’s docuseries on the Lyceum Address. He hosts the podcast This Moment in Democracy and has been a fact-checker and contributor for the Smithsonian Channel, CNN’s Race for the White House, and PBS’s MetroFocus.