Ron White

Click for New Website: Quincy’s Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration

Author of New Best-Selling Lincoln Biography
Ronald C. White, Jr., To Lecture Here Tuesday

Ronald C. White, Jr., author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, will discuss his important new research into the life of the 16th President at Quincy University’s North Campus Auditoreum, 18th and Seminary Road, Quincy, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 28.

White’s lecture is free and open to the public. Sponsors are Quincy University and the Quincy Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

White’s new publication, published January 13, is the heralded result of the author’s intensive research. Known for the depth of his scholarship, White is the author of several historiographies, among them, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural and the prize-winning The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words.

Learning While Leading

An Essay by Ronald C. White Jr.

The most important lesson Lincoln could teach Obama is that he will need to school himself.

At the risk of disabusing the messianic comparisons of the qualities that Lincoln and Obama brought full-blown to the presidency, what is being missed is how much Lincoln taught himself to be president on the job. Painfully aware of his own shortcomings - in administrative abilities and military understanding, to name but two - the success of Lincoln's presidency lay not simply in the nature of his political genius, nurtured as both a politician and lawyer in Illinois, but in the hard work he expended day after wearing day in the White House. In the years after his death, Lincoln's Illinois friends formed a harmonious chorus - "we knew it all the time" - but in truth many were surprised at how fast and far "Old Abe" grew into being president.

Please click here to read full essay.

Ronald C. White, Jr.

Ronald C. White’s A. Lincoln: A Biography was published by Random House on January 13. The book was the Main Selection of the History Book Club for January 2009.

White also authored Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, a Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club selection.

He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library, Visiting Professor of History at UCLA and Professor of American Religious History Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary.