Abraham Lincoln

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• 11/14/2021
  

  Look to Lincoln's Interactions with Black Americans to Understand His Racial Attitudes

  by Michael Burlingame

  As Lincoln's personal racial views have come under scrutiny, a biographer says that the prominent and ordinary Black Americans the 16th president dealt with didn't have the doubts today's activists do about where Lincoln stood. 

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• SOURCE: Points: Blog of the Alcohol & Drugs History Society and the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy
  8/31/2021
  

  The Lincoln Family and Pennyroyal: Re-Evaluating Medicines in the Archive and Beyond

  by Emma Verstraete

  An examination of Abraham Lincoln's family purchases of medicinal herbs highlights the need to use the lens of oral history and folk knowledge to interpret sources. 

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  4/7/2021
  

  April 6, 2021: On the Republican Party

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Since the time of Lincoln, the Republican Party has been part of a bipartisan understanding that expanding the nation's infrastructure – meaning investing in all sorts of supports to economic and social activity – has been a boon to prosperity. That commitment is fraying today. 

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• SOURCE: Civil War Memory
  3/8/2021
  

  The Problem With CNN’s Lincoln Documentary

  by Kevin M. Levin

  In a brief review, history educator and civil war scholar Kevin M. Levin says CNN's latest Lincoln documentary doesn't use the knowledge of a great roster of historians to full advantage. 

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• SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
  2/22/2021
  

  Take Down Chicago’s Lincoln Statues? It’s Iconoclasm Gone Mad

  by Sidney Blumenthal and Harold Holzer

  Two biographers of Lincoln question the Chicago Monuments Project, which has placed famous statues of the 16th president on a list of public memorials subject to possible removal.

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• 2/14/2021
  

  Lincoln and the Lesson of Leading From Behind

  by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Joe Biden's inaugural address signals his willingness to follow Abraham Lincoln in "leading from behind" by listening and lifting the voices of others. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  2/11/2021
  

  Politicians Quote Abraham Lincoln a Lot. Historians Say They Don't Always Do His Words Justice

  by Olivia B. Waxman

  Kate Masur, Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, Nina Silber and Thavolia Glymph describe the selective and deceptive quotings of Lincoln that have sprung up in this political climate and suggest some futher reading. 

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• SOURCE: New York Daily News
  2/5/2021
  

  What Lincoln Understood About Unity

  by Harold Holzer

  "The fact is, even the most eloquent calls for harmony seldom repair a house divided — not without the accompaniment of painful but unavoidable choices about national policy and purpose."

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• 1/24/2021
  

  "Hands Off Until He Was Safe Over": David Reynolds Urges Biden to Look to Lincoln

  by James Thornton Harris

  Historian David S. Reynolds recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln and his Times, a cultural biography that shows how the 16th president was shaped by the many social currents swirling in the young United States.

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• 1/19/2021
  

  Biden Isn't the First President to Have to Change Tracks en Route to Inauguration

  by Jeff Rogg

  The threat of violence forced Joe Biden to cancel plans to travel from Wilmington to Washington by Amtrak, as he famously did during his Senate years. The decision recalls Lincoln's efforts to avoid the (possibly apocryphal) Baltimore Plot. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/12/2021
  

  Review: Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document?

  by Gordon S. Wood

  Gordon Wood says James Oakes's new book examines the dialectical relationship between 19th century interpretations of the Constitution as a pro-slavery and anti-slavery document and argues that that debate steered Lincoln toward a commitment to racial equality as inextricable from abolition.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/5/2020
  

  The Senators Who Were Expelled After Refusing To Accept Lincoln’s Election

  by Gillian Brockell

  Not since the crisis of secession and the Civil War has the U.S. Senate expelled a member. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  10/19/2020
  

  John Brown And Abraham Lincoln: Divergent Paths In The Fight To End Slavery (audio)

  H.W. Brands discusses his new book "The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom" with NPR's Fresh Air. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/8/2020
  

  Kamala Harris’s ‘Little History Lesson’ About Lincoln’s Supreme Court Vacancy Wasn’t Exactly True

  Lincoln delayed in announcing a replacement to Chief Justice Roger Taney in large part because the leaving the appointment unresolved would help preserve his fragile coalition through the election, especially by inducing potential rivals to campaign for him.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  10/12/2020
  

  Packing the Court: Amid National Crises, Lincoln and His Republicans Remade the Supreme Court to Fit their Agenda

  by Calvin Schermerhorn

  In remaking the court in Republicans’ image, the party got what it wanted – but not what was needed to fulfill the promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

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• 10/11/2020
  

  Like Lincoln, Biden at Gettysburg Urges Reunification

  by Walter G. Moss

  Joe Biden's speech evoked the calls for unity and shared purpose made by presidents from Lincoln to FDR to Obama. The coming weeks will tell if voters embrace the message.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  10/6/2020
  

  How Abraham Lincoln Confronted—and Helped Spread—Political Misinformation

  by Elizabeth Mitchell

  Today's media makes it easier to identify stories with reporters who have a track record for credibility (or lack thereof), and harder for political partisans to plant misinformation, though as even Honest Abe's track record shows, politicians will use disinformation to their advantage as much as they can. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  10/5/2020
  

  Holding an Election During the Civil War Set the Standard for Us Today

  by Jonathan W. White

  “We can not have free government without elections,” Lincoln told the crowd, “and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” 

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• SOURCE: Society for U.S. Intellectual History
  9/28/2020
  

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Abraham Lincoln, and American Jewish History

  by Rebecca Brenner Graham

  Public mourning for Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a prominent Jewish American evokes Abraham Lincoln's role in supporting Jews in Civil War service, and the Jewish community's mourning after his assassination.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  9/21/2020
  

  Why We Keep Reinventing Abraham Lincoln

  Adam Gopnik considers new books about Lincoln by David S. Reynolds and Sidney Blumenthal that address the personality and governing of the 16th president.