About the Author

Herman Belz is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He is the author of some fifty-six articles or chapters in books and nineteen essays, and he has served as consultant to the American Historical Association’s Constitutional History in the Schools Project, National Endowment for the Humanities, Educational Testing Service, National Video Communications, Vision Associates, and the Carter Museum and Library. Professor Belz has won grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Bar Foundation for Legal History, among others. His first book was awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association. He has served on numerous University of Maryland committees, was Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History, and was a member of the Campus Senate Executive Committee and a member of the Graduate Council. Professor Belz was a Visiting Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University in the academic year 2001–2002 and was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities in 2005.

Reviews

"The American mind has long been divided over whether Abraham Lincoln was a tyrannical megalomaniac bent on trampling constitutional restraints to restore the Union and free the slaves or whether he was in fact a Henry Clay conservative Whig operating strictly within constitutional parameters. Two recent collections suggest persuasively that Lincoln was indeed operating carefully and very consciously within constitutional limits, albeit with a definite agenda to expand those limits (as Garry Wills and others have suggested), to embrace Jefferson's grander vision of human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence. This volume of essays by Belz (Univ. of Maryland), an eminent Lincoln constitutional authority, explores in an intriguing interdisciplinary methodology Lincoln's constitutional orientation in prosecuting the war, freeing the slaves, and providing a blueprint for Reconstruction. Complements Think Anew, Act Anew: Abraham Lincoln on Slavery, Freedom, and Union (Ch, Jul'98), edited by noted Ulysses Grant and Civil War historian Brooks Simpson (Arizona State Univ.) Upper-division undergraduates and above" -Choice "This anthology will be of value to all Lincoln collections and should attract the many persons who, for pleasure and profit read and reread Lincolniana." -Library Journal "[A Press Portrait] ... reminds us of the bitterness and tension of the Civil War years, and Mr. Mitgang's anthology helps us to see the wartime President as he appeared to his own generation." -The New York Times Book Review