“Propaganda,” historian Richard Hofstadter called it, dismissing the Emancipation Proclamation as having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”

“A great beacon light of hope to millions,” Martin Luther King, Jr. called it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.”

Which was right?

Some thoughts on an even dozen of the more enlightening books I've read over the years while researching One Must Tell The Bees and why I highly recommend them.

The image above is from the Harvard University Press circa 2012. When the first visitors entered the newly opened Ford’s Theatre’s Center for Education and Leadership, they were greeted by this enormous 34-foot tower of scholarship, comprised of thousands of copies of the over 15,000 published books on Lincoln. The portion of books in this stack with which I’m familiar would probably come up to my knee—if I was kneeling.