Jean H. Baker

Mary Todd Lincoln : a biography

In this elegant biography, Jean Baker uses previously untapped sources to portray the troubled wife of Abraham Lincoln. Photographs.

Getting Right with Women's Suffrage

My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to womens history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Womens Clubs, the PTA, womens literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Womens National Republican Club.

Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Affairs of party, Jean Baker asserts, were a central feature of public life in nineteenth-century America. In this book she explores the way in which the Northern Democrats of the mid-eighteen hundreds lived their public lives. She begins with a psychobiographical explanation of how people became Democrats, weighing the importance of such influences as education and family life. She then discusses two major elements that set Democrats apart from members of other political organizations: a modified Republican ideology tailored to the circumstances of the Civil War, and a mordant racism conveyed most strikingly through minstrelsy. Finally, Baker studies the neglected subject of partisan behavior, concentrating on the significance of parades, voting, and other rituals. In Affairs of Party Jean Baker brings together the three basic components of a political culture-education, thought, and behavior-and provides an understanding of the collective values of Northern Democrats and an insight into the elusive meaning of party experience. In her new preface, Professor Baker places her book in the context of both recent scholarship and recent political and cultural developments.