SIU Press

Southern Illinois University Press is stepping up its ACW coverage, although that seems to mean more Lincoln titles for now.

The Press has done great work publishing the papers of U.S. Grant by John Y. Simon (the very one who said that Civil War readers were like little children who want to hear the same story told exactly the same way every bedtime; the same who coined the term "rubber Lincolns" to characterize pop history at the Lincoln Museum). Good for them.

I bought an SIU Press mainstay last week, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln . I got this idea that I wanted to timeline Lincoln's pesonal crises vis a vis certain comand decisions and then overlay that on episodes of out-of-control behavior from Chase, Stanton, and Seward.

This project I know will pay dividends if I can find the time to do it.