The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Conflicting Worlds)
The authors (Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams) will be familiar names to readers of Civil War material; each of these historians occasionally discusses the conflict on C-SPAN. Therefore, their essays about the Emancipation Proclamation, the political and moral cynosure of the war, will be greeted with interest. Independent scholar Holzer's essay is the most instantly accessible, interpreting the visual imagery of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Holzer's explanations of a print or statue's creation contain many a curiosity, such as Lincoln's cooperation in the production of the most recognizable image of the proclamation, painter Francis Carpenter'sFirst Reading ofthe Emancipation Proclamation. Williams, a judge, embeds the proclamation in its legal context, such as the Confiscation Acts that preceded it, and the Thirteenth Amendment that succeeded it. College professor Medford's more ruminative essay reaches for ambiguities that attend the proclamation, especially its remembrance amidst the postwar resubordination of blacks that dampened, but never entirely extinguished, the initial exultation in the freedom promised by the proclamation. For active Civil War collections. REVWRCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved