Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War

BENJAMIN PLATT THOMAS is generally considered to have been one of our nation's leading authorities on Lincoln. He was born in Pemberton, New Jersey, in 1902, and attended Johns Hopkins University, where he received his A.B. degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1929. After teaching history for three years at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, he served as executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association from 1932 to 1936, was associate editor of the Abraham Lincoln Quarterly from 1940 to 1953, and, until his death in 1956, was a trustee of the Illinois Historical Library. Before doing his biography of Lincoln, Thomas wrote five books, of which perhaps the most outstanding was Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers, published in 1947.

He was also the author of Lincoln's New Salem ( 1934), Lincoln, 1847- 1853 ( 1936), and Theodore Weld, Crusader for Freedom ( 1950), and edited Three Years with Grant, recollections of war correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader ( 1955). Mr. Thomas had also been an editorial adviser for the Abraham Lincoln Association's "Collected Works of Lincoln."

HAROLD M. HYMAN was born in New York City in 1924. After taking his A.B. degree at the University of California at Los Angeles, he did graduate work at Columbia University, and his doctoral dissertation, Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests during the Civil War and Reconstruction, won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award in 1952. He has taught at Earlham College in Indiana and at Arizona State University, and is presently an associate professor of history at U.C.L.A. In 1959 he received the Sidney Hillman Award for his To Try Men's Soul: Loyalty tests in American History.

Mr. Hyman is married, and the father of two daughters and a son.

January 1962

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