| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Kenneth J. Winkle. The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade. 2001. Pp. x, 395. $28.95.
The question that the vast bulk of Lincoln studies want to ask is what made Abraham Lincoln so extraordinary? It takes an extraordinarily different way of looking at Lincoln to ask entirely the opposite question: in what ways was Lincoln actually quite typical of his times? Asking that question seems only to have occurred to Kenneth J. Winkle, and the job he has done of answering it gives us for the first time what we might call a social history of the sixteenth president.	1
That Lincoln rose to national prominence from obscurity is something even Lincoln attested to—though without pride. But what kind of obscurity, exactly? Winkle's fundamental accomplishment is not just to identify the patterns of that obscurity but to measure in what ways Lincoln conformed to and then transcended them. This process begins with Winkle's consideration of the long history of the Lincoln family in America. Every Lincoln, after the first Lincoln arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s, moved "to another colony or state as a boy or young man, marrying in that intermediate location, fathering at least one son there, and then moving with his family to yet a third destination, where he died"—and so did Abraham Lincoln.	. . .

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