The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln with Saladin Ambar (Diversion Books, 2025)

Saladin Ambar, a political scientist and senior scholar at the Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University Eagleton Institute of Politics, has authored a fascinating and propulsive new book focusing on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. The book, Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes that Shaped Abraham Lincoln (Diversion Books, 2025), focuses on the violent events that transpired in the 1830s that contributed to Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and this important speech that he gave long before he became a political figure in the United States.