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BOOK REVIEWS25 1 icans as they sought to gain their preferences or to treat them within a sectional focus that is not always applicable. Still, Greenstone has issued an original and powerful challenge to scholars of American thought and practice and provided a compelling framework for further explorations of similar imagination. Joel H. Silbey Cornell University The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend. By John Evangelist Walsh. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. x, 187. $25-95) Following the lead of scholars John Y. Simon and Douglas Wilson, Mr. Walsh, a former publishing executive who has written a dozen books, argues that the Ann Rutledge legend is not a legend but a historical fact. To ignore it would be to overlook an event that critically shaped Abraham Lincoln's personality, he would say. Mr. Walsh nimbly lays out the evidence, most of it from the oral narratives recorded by Lincoln's law partner William H. Herndon. He has no significant new evidence but believes that the record long available has been slighted by professional historians (before Simon and Wilson). In arguing from the evidence and in speculating on Lincoln's psychological state, Mr. Walsh is somewhat heavy handed. Moreover, he confines his history to the narrowest focus possible and makes no effort to inform his narrative with insights from women's history, social history, folklore, political history, or medical history—all of which might be brought to bear usefully. As an informative enterprise, Jean Baker's Mary Todd Lincoln, which she describes as "biography as social history," offers much more than this singleminded little book. Though a slow reader, I finished the book in an afternoon—a tribute to the author's gifts as a writer. But readers of Civil War History could spend their afternoons more profitably, delving into the more significant parts of Lincoln 's life: his career in the Whig party, his role in the Republican party, and his presidential administration. Mark E. Neely, Jr. St. Louis University Abraham Lincoln the Orator: Penetrating the Lincoln Legend. By Lois J. Einhorn . (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Pp. xx, 225. $45.00.) This beautifully crafted book is the sixteenth volume in a series on Great American Orators. In this study of Lincoln as an orator, Lois J. Einhorn has divided her work into two parts. The first part seeks to analyze the rhetoric of Lincoln. The second part consists of nine selected Lincoln speeches ...

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