Abraham Lincoln and the virtues of patience and calmness in foreign affairs

Another interesting lecture, this time about Abraham Lincoln's foreign policy as President. It featured a preference for waiting and seeing which might well be adopted more often today, rather than media-focused activism.

There is also an amusing caricature at the beginning of his Minister in St Petersburg, during the time of the Civil War, the "bounder" and anti-slavery campaigner Cassius Marcellus Henry Clay (pictured right), who later helped organised the purchase of Alaska from Russia. It was after him, at a couple of generations removed, that Cassius Clay, the boxer, was named.

But most of all the talk is a model of clear speech which many Russian (and other) lecturers could copy with advantage.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?316821-1/book-discussion-lincoln-world