Jason Emerson

The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln's mental illness based on the lost letters, and the first new interpretation of the insanity case in twenty years. This compelling story of the purported insanity of one of America's most tragic first ladies provides new and previously unpublished materials, including the psychiatric diagnosis of Mary's mental illness and her lost will. This book reveals Abraham Lincoln's understanding...

In Lincoln the Inventor, Jason Emerson offers the first treatment of Abraham Lincoln's invention of a device to buoy vessels over shoals and its subsequent patent as more than mere historical footnote. In this book, Emerson shows how, when, where, and why Lincoln created his invention; how his penchant for inventions and inventiveness was part of his larger political belief in internal improvements and free labor principles; how his interest in the...

"Written in 1927 but barred from timely publication by the Lincoln family, this book is based on nearly two dozen intimate letters written between Mary Lincoln and her close friend Myra Bradwell mainly during the former's 1875 incarceration in an insane asylum [in Batavia, Illinois]. By the 1920s most accounts of Mrs. Lincoln focused on her negative qualities and dismissed her as "crazy." Bradwell's granddaughter Myra Helmer Pritchard wrote this distinctly...