Martin Phillip Johnson

After receiving his B.A. from the University of California, Riverside, Martin Johnson studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris before earning a Ph.D. in History at Brown University in 1993. An Asscociate Professor of History at Miami University Hamilton, he has also held appointments at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Dr. Johnson has published two books on nineteenth-century French history but his main research interest for the past decade has focused on the American Civil War and the politics of the Lincoln administration. His most recent book, Writing the Gettysburg Address (University Press of Kansas, 2013), resolves longstanding mysteries about how Lincoln wrote his most admired speech and proposes a new interpretation of its place in Lincoln's political development. Johnson traces in Lincoln's manuscripts the way the speech grew and changed with each step of his eventful and surprising journey to the podium, where Lincoln's own deep sense of political and emotional dedication to the cause moved him to create the words and image of an enduring and authentic legend. Lincoln's two-minute speech made the battlefield and the cemetery into landmarks of the American imagination, but Johnson shows that it was Lincoln’s own journey to Gettysburg that made the Gettysburg Address. The eminent Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has called Writing the Gettysburg Address “a beautifully accomplished book…one of the best books ever written about the Gettysburg Address.”

Dr. Johnson lives in Hamilton, Ohio, with his wife, Kelli Lyon Johnson, an Associate Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton, and their daughter, Reilly.