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Jonathan Earle

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Jonathan Earle

Jonathan Earle is a specialist in the history of the antebellum United States, especially its politics and culture. Educated at Columbia and Princeton Universities, he is the author of numerous books and articles including the prize-winning Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil. He Has the People is his fifth book. Earle has served as dean of the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University since 2014. He resides in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

 

 

Schedule

Will be posted when available.

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

A gripping and granular look at how Abraham Lincoln got elected the 16th president of the United States. Using the writings and story of Murat Halstead, the nation's first campaign journalist, as well as previously unused documents from Lincoln's campaign manager, Jonathan Earle captures the full drama of the 1860 election. He shows how Lincoln, a one-time Congressman from Illinois, and a dark horse against the more established Stephen Douglas, the Democratic frontrunner, and William Henry Seward, the presumptive Republican nominee, got the people and votes he needed to win in a protracted yet furiously disputed election cycle.