What to read after Lincoln and New York?

"Abraham Lincoln has long been remembered as a product of Illinois by way of Kentucky and Indiana - by tradition, one of American history's quintessential westerners. But Lincoln owed much of his national political success, not to mention his enshrinement in public memory, to his impact on the quintessentially eastern state of New York, and in turn, to New York's profound impact on him." "The full measure of the sixteenth president's relationship with New York City has never been properly investigated. Nor have historians taken stock of - or given museum-goers and readers the opportunity to immerse themselves in - the unique political, social, and commercial environment that helped to create and sustain the evolving image of Lincoln us a partisan politician, statesman, wartime commander-in-chief, emancipator, and ultimately, as a martyr to union and liberty." "That New York's publishers, business leaders, elected officials, writers, preachers, and editors were able convincingly to introduce these successive images at the same time they promulgated a parallel, wholly negative Lincoln reputation - that of frontier hick, jokester, ruthless military leader, and heartless tyrant - constitutes one of the most astonishing episodes in the history of what Lincoln himself once called "public sentiment." Only in New York could such robust, and contradictory, public relations campaigns have been launched and sustained in tandem." "The 2009 New York Historical Society exhibition, which this catalogue accompanies, explores for the first time how America's flourishing media and financial capital - also a center of pro-slavery sentiment and anti-Lincoln Democratic politics - contributed to and influenced Lincoln's political rise, his prosecution of the Civil War, his decisions on emancipation and African-American enlistment, and ultimately Lincoln's place in history." --Book Jacket.