Non-Fiction: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln

Lectures and conversations with historians, authors, and thinkers.

Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln offers an eye-opening portrait of Abraham Lincoln behind the scenes.  With an array of newly discovered and previously overlooked private documents, Matthew Pinsker helps readers understand the career-long party politician whose brilliant coalition-building during the Civil War set the foundation for emancipation and Union victory.  Historian Harold Holzer, reviewing for the Wall Street Journal, calls Boss Lincoln "a landmark book" and "Team of Rivals on steroids." Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner says the book offers "something genuinely new about Lincoln and his career."  And New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie concludes that Boss Lincoln is “one of the best recent books on Lincoln" and "extraordinarily relevant to our political moment.”

Matthew Pinsker holds the Brian Pohanka Chair of Civil War History at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and serves as Director of the House Divided Project, a popular educational initiative on nineteenth-century US history.  Matt has held visiting fellowships at New America Foundation, U.S. Army War College, and the National Constitution Center.  He graduated from Harvard College and received a doctorate from the University of Oxford. He is the author of three books, including most recently, Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln, which The Wall Street Journal has labeled a "landmark book" and which New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has called “extraordinarily relevant to our political moment.”  Matt produces popular Substack series “What Would Lincoln Do?” and appears regularly on TV channels such as C-SPAN, PBS, and History. His online series Sound Smart, has become a mainstay in social studies classrooms.   Matt has been recognized by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) as a Distinguished Lecturer, and he serves on the advisory boards of several historic organizations, such as Ford’s Theatre Society, Gettysburg Foundation, National Civil War Museum, President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, and the Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History & Democracy.