Ronald C. White Jr. is among the many scholars who first found inspiration for a topic while mining the stacks at the Huntington Library. He actually credits a 1993 Huntington exhibition—“The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America”—with inspiring his two books on Abraham Lincoln.

White, who first taught about Lincoln in the history department at UCLA during and after the Huntington exhibit, is currently professor of American intellectual and religious history at San Francisco Theological Seminary and concurrently a Huntington research fellow. In 2002 he wrote Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural Address. In this book he explores the meaning of Lincoln’s 703-word speech in a broad historical and theological context.

White’s current book expands his inquiry to 11 major speeches, addresses, and public letters, all composed during Lincoln’s presidency. Although White’s focus is on documents that have long been part of the public record, he explores Lincoln’s editorial decisions by using rare letters, diaries, books, pamphlets, and manuscripts found at the Huntington and other libraries. For example, a printer’s proof of Lincoln’s first inaugural address contains hand-written suggestions from Orville H. Browning, a friend from Illinois. In response to Lincoln’s request for advice, Browning had praised the president-elect’s draft, but revised one passage that could antagonize citizens in the South. Lincoln implemented the suggestion. The printer’s proof was purchased in 1920 by Henry E. Huntington.

–Matt Stevens

Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past | William Deverell
University of California Press, 2004
Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico came of age through appropriating—and even obliterating—the region’s connections to Mexican places and people. Whitewashed Adobe uncovers an urban identity—and the power structure that fostered it—with far-reaching implications for contemporary Los Angeles.

Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 | Jonathan H. Earle
University of North Carolina Press, 2004
Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. As Earle shows, these political changes at the local, state, and national levels greatly intensified the sectional crisis and brought the nation closer to Civil War.

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America | Douglas Flamming
University of California Press, 2005
Bound for Freedom is the first full account of Los Angeles’ black community in the half-century before World War II. Flamming takes his readers from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, through the Great Migration, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the build-up to World War II. This history evokes community life and political activism during the city’s transformation from small town to sprawling metropolis. Flamming shows that the history of race in Los Angeles is crucial to the understanding of race in America.

Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years | Karen Lystra
University of California Press, 2004
Dangerous Intimacy recounts the final years of Mark Twain through the letters and diaries of those who witnessed them firsthand. Lystra supplements Twain’s own autobiographical writings with the diaries and letters of his daughters. She also draws upon the diary of Twain’s secretary, Isabel Lyon, who failed in her calculated attempt to become the second wife of the widowed author but succeeded in exiling Twain’s youngest daughter, Jean.

Isherwood: A Life Revealed | Peter Parker
Random House, 2004
Parker has written a major biography of Christopher Isherwood, whose novels and short stories (including those that inspired the musical Cabaret) have always been assumed to be largely autobiographical. Parker presents the story of a life that evolved from a conventional English boyhood to that of one of the most acclaimed writers in America.

The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 | Carla Gardina Pestana
Harvard University Press, 2004
Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Pestana connects these cataclysmic events and the development of plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam. She presents a compelling case for rethinking assumptions about empire and colonialism and offers an invaluable look at the creation of the English Atlantic world.

Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America | Joshua Piker
Harvard University Press, 2004
Piker uses the history of Okfuskee, an 18th-century Creek town in Alabama, to reframe standard narratives of both Native and American experiences. By comparing the Okfuskees’ experiences to those of their contemporaries in colonial British America, the book provides a nuanced discussion of the ways in which Native and Euro-American histories intersected with, and diverged from, each other.