Why Lincoln would be appalled by today's income inequality

How many of the candidates that are running for President today, have the depth of character and ideas that, if they were to be elected, we still might be talking about them, studying them and being surprised by them, 150 years after their death? The answer is probably none.

That is certainly not the case with Abraham Lincoln. 150 years after his death, people like esteemed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer are still plowing the depths of Lincoln's convictions and portraying what he accomplished.

Convictions and ideas that are, in spite of the best efforts of Lincoln’s own party today, still part of the fabric of America. Holzer displays these ideas in A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity

My conversation with Harold Holzer:

Lincoln astride the world: America's first age of globalization

America has long gotten itself involved in civil wars around the world. In Korea, Vietnam, Spain, on the African continent and more recently in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. It should not be surprising then to realize that other nations were engaged in the outcome of America's Civil War and that it provided Lincoln ample opportunity to engage in foreign affairs.

We think of Lincoln as our domestic president. Lincoln saving the union so that this nation would not perish. But he also straddled the world during what might be called America's first age of globalization.

Kevin Peraino, a veteran Newsweek journalist looks at this side of Lincoln in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power.

My conversation with Kevin Peraino: