TED WIDMER is Distinguished Lecturer at Macaulay Honors College (City University of New York), former Director, John Carter Brown Library (Brown University), and former speechwriter and Senior Advisor to President Bill Clinton. He is the author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, which won the Lincoln Forum Book Prize in 2020. He has edited numerous works including, for Library of America, American Speeches: Political Oratory (2006) in two volumes. He writes regularly about American history in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, where he helped create the Disunion feature about the Civil War.