The Fiery Trial

The Fiery Angel (Russian: Огненный ангел — Ognenny angel in transliteration) is an opera in five acts by Sergei Prokofiev to a Russian libretto by the composer, based on the novel The Fiery Angel (1908) by Valery Bryusov. The opera treats the dark arts in a largely sarcastic and humorous manner. The music is dark and imposing, and the singing, especially that of Renata, is chillingly histrionic.

In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have interpreted the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second Great Awakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death.

John Locke Scripps, who had convinced Lincoln to write his first campaign autobiography, asserted that the 16th president had become "the Great American Man—the grand central figure in American (perhaps the World's) History." Historians still find it hard to quibble with this opinion of Lincoln's place in the story of America. Lincoln was the central figure in the nation's greatest crisis, the Civil War. His achievements in office make as good a case as any that he was the greatest president in U.S. history.