Like many contemporary journalists who've written a great deal about politics, Elizabeth Mitchell couldn't resist a story about free speech and a president manipulating the press. In fact, her new book is just another of several recent efforts about those precisely intertwining topics.

But where bookstore shelves are sagging with sagas about the Trump administration and his apparent inability to not lie to or about the media, Mitchell's latest nonfiction title focuses on another president — one known popularly as Honest Abe. Indeed, Mitchell's "Lincoln's Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House" is a ceaselessly revelatory examination of truly strange and little-known events during one of the most widely-reported times in American history.

Not only is the book vastly entertaining and as twisty as the threads of a deep-state conspiracy theory, "Lincoln's Lie" is comforting in its assertion that, yes, history repeats itself and, by doing so, suggests we always get through the brutal times.

Mitchell is the latest guest in the monthly "Read of The Day" book club and will appear virtually Tuesday. "Read of The Day" is sponsored by The Day in partnership with Bank Square Books.

The former executive editor at the late political monthly George, Mitchell has written articles about such free-range topics as horseracing, prison chaplains, women's soccer, New York's first female police detective, and the idea of the vanishing "public intellectual" for publications such as Spin, Smithsonian, and the New York Daily News. Her other books include "Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty" and "W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty." She's also the co-founder of ReadThis, a volunteer group that delivers books where needed, including to troops abroad, children living in poverty, and public schools with no library.

"Lincoln's Lie" centers around an 1864 scam wherein a fake press release — apparently from the White House — indicated the president was ready to implement another military draft, this time calling for the conscription of 400,000 new Union Soldiers during the bloodiest days of the Civil War.

When two major New York City newspapers ran the story — about what was destined to be a hugely unpopular move — there were riots in the streets and the stock market erupted. But: Did Lincoln in fact call for the draft, or was the story a hoax perpetrated by the Confederacy or even a rival within the president's own party? And did Lincoln overreact to the fake news when he sent the military in to shut down the newspapers?

Oh, and there's this tangential side effect worth considering: Who stood to profit from the tumultuous sales of gold on Wall Street that immediately happened in reaction to rumors of a new draft?

Given President Trump's ongoing, fan-the-flames approach to impugning the media, it's perhaps a surpise that Mitchell conceptualized the book before he was elected.

"You'd think Trump had someting to do with it, wouldn't you?" she asks by phone on a Sunday morning in late November. "The weird thing is, what got me interested in writing the book was just a brief incident I came across before Trump was in power. It was about the publication of the 1864 draft rumor and Lincoln then going overboard by calling in the military. Given what we know of (Lincoln), I'd expected him to be in full support of freedom of the press, and this surprised me and the contradiction made me want to look further."

While these elements are nestled at the heart of "Lincoln's Lies," the story starts much earlier, before the president was elected, and details the Republican candidate's carte blanche and astonishingly smooth ability to nuance the media for his own purposes. Not exactly the sort of behavior that ultimately earns one an enduring nickname attesting to one integrity — and her research genuinely surprised Mitchell in the context of what she knew of Lincoln. And the more she wrote and dug, the stranger the story got.

"I definitely admired Lincoln before I started work on the book," she says. "By the end, I still admire him greatly, but he's a much more complex figure than I'd known. That he manipulated the press early in his career — when he was still what I thought of as a country lawyer — was just very interesting to me. But he was much, much more, as a politician and a person, and I came to realize the complexities in his personal life led to complexities in his leadership. There were so many elements."

Though Mitchell's book indeed brings to the surface a lot of insightful and compelling dimensions to Lincoln's perhaps overly simple history-textbook representations, there are plenty more fascinating characters in the book. Well-known and moderately familiar names such as Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Ward Beecher, Edwin Stanton and John Adams Dix appear in new and intriguing context.

And readers will be amazed by the young superstar newspaper reporter Joseph Howard, whose freewheeling approach to his coverage of the president might have served as a primer for folks like Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe. Howard was a tremendous stylist and ambitious, but in service to the latter, he was happy to shift into the realm of (unacknowledged) fiction if it made a story better.

Mitchell says one of the happiest parts of working on the book was the discovery of Howard. "I didn't know of him," she says. "When you look quickly at the basic facts, it's interesting. But the story required that I go deeper, and I became absolutely delighted with him. He could easily be the subject of his own book. The ways in which he persisted in making things up, and how the anecdotes reflected back on his own intellectual life, are amazing."

Throughout "Lincoln's Lie," the reader stays hooked by Mitchell's light but assured tone. She presents history as though telling a story to a old friend — one who's bright and curious but also with a sense of humor and a big thirst for knowledge. Plus, the structure of the book ratchets up the tension and arftully delivers surprise after surprise with expert timing.

"I did have that writer's excitement on this project because I knew, doing the research, it was going to be engaging material," Mitchell says. "We're so used to reading history in that dry, post-mortem sense. I wanted to present it as though readers are experiencing the events in the immediacy and anxiety of real time. And I work hard. I go out of my way to find stuff and details and anecdotes so that there are payoffs for the reader like you'd get if it was a fictional mystery. And what makes it special is that it all really happened."

To see and hear

Who: Elizabeth Mitchell, author of "Lincoln's Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House"

What: A virtual conversation hosted by The Day's Rick Koster for the latest in our "Read of THE DAY" book club series in partnership with Bank Square Books

When: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Via Zoom chat

How much: Free, register at www.banksquarebooks.com

For more information: (860) 536-3795