Biography of james m mcpherson
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James M. McPherson
American historian (born 1936)
James Munro McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American historian specializing in the American Civil War. He is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. McPherson was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003.
Early life and education
[edit]Born in Valley City, North Dakota, McPherson graduated from St. Peter High School in St. Peter, Minnesota, and received his Bachelor of Arts in 1958 from Gustavus Adolphus College, also in St. Peter, from which he graduated magna cum laude. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, where he studied under C. Vann Woodward.[1]
Career
[edit]McPherson joined the faculty of Princeton in 1962.[1] His works include The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War
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James M. McPherson
Presidential Address
No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865
Biography
From the 2003 Presidential Biography booklet
Download the PDF
By William J. Cooper Jr., Louisiana State University
Historian in the Academy and in the World
I first met Jim McPherson on a hot July day in 1986 on the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. We were both participating in a British-produced television documentary on the Civil War, The Divided Union, which was designed, in part, to take the views of scholars to a wider audience. Meeting him in such a place and for such a purpose was particularly appropriate, perhaps, in view of Jim’s career and scholarly work. Of course, long before 1986 and Antietam, I already knew of Jim as a notable historian.
Born in 1936 in Valley City, North Dakota, Jim received his BA degree from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, in 1958. He went on to Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with C. Vann Woodward and re
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"For A Vast Future Also": Lincoln and the Millennium
BY JAMES M. MCPHERSON
Jefferson Lecture
March 27, 2000
When Abraham Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton intoned: "Now he belongs to the ages."
Stanton's remark was more prescient than he knew, for Lincoln's image and his legacy became the possession not only of future ages of Americans but also of people of other nations. On the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909, Leo Tolstoy described him as "a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity." An Islamic leader projected a more militant image of Lincoln, declaring that America's sixteenth president "spoke with a voice of thunder. . .and his deeds were as strong as the rock." When Jacqueline Kennedy lived in the White House, she sought comfort in the Lincoln Room in times of trouble. "The kind of peace I felt in that room," she recalled, "was what you feel when going into a church. I used to feel his strength, I'd sort of