What is teaching at Coastal Carolina University like in comparison?
At Illinois in my American history course, I had 750 students in one classroom. Here it’s very different. You get to interact with the students more, which is important, because part of a professor’s job is mentoring. Students can learn by observing how faculty deal with problems, even beyond the classroom. It’s the kind of thing that I experienced when I was an undergraduate at Furman, which made all the difference to me. Neither my mom nor dad finished high school, so I have a lot of empathy for first generation college students who are coming to Coastal. I’ve been really impressed with them. This is the year of Lincoln’s bicentennial. Your last two books are about him. When did your professional interest in Lincoln begin? When I was a child in Ninety Six we had a bookmobile that came to school every two weeks. By the time I was 12, I had read every book in it, and there were two people I had picked out as heroes. One was Abraham Lincoln and the other was Jesse James. I think what dr
