Lincoln Dreamt He Died

Andrew Burstein

"This quirky, episodic 200-year gambol explores the development of the American Dream by unpacking Americans' dreams.... Burstein's elegantly crafted nightstand tome demonstrates that dreams "reflect a distinctly... human desire to chart time via stories."--Publishers Weekly

"An acclaimed historian dives headlong into the dreams of some iconic Americans." -"Kirkus reviews"

""Lincoln Dreamt He""Died" provides a compelling perspective on America's collective psyche. Readers will gain new insight into luminaries including Benjamin Rush, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson, but will likely gain just as much pleasure from the vividly-drawn and lesser known dreamers: a spurned lover in New Orleans, a Norwegian-born sailor in Manhattan, a Civil War soldier and the young woman he left behind in Ohio. Burstein has given us a first-rate cultural history, 'from the inside out.'"--Amy Greenberg, author of "A Wicked War"

"Andrew Burstein is one of the most original and readable historians in our midst."--Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College and two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize

"I don't Know any thing more troublesome than . . . those people who are eternally pestering one with recitals of their dreams," complained Henry Laurens, onetime president of the Continental Congress. Two days later, he anonymously printed his own dream in a newspaper. With a keen eye for such fascination and ambivalence, Andrew Burstein has written a compelling history of unconscious America. For much of our past, Americans slept; dreams filled their hours and shaped their identities. Yet rarely have historians looked at the nation asleep, or at the lingering of dreams in daylight. Burstein, one of our most creative and perceptive scholars and writers, awakens us to the significance of dreams--powerful, peculiar, and elusive--in the lives of such figures as Washington and Lincoln, Thoreau and Twain, and in the broader culture of the young republic."--T.