Abraham Lincoln 
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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.
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SOURCE: Huffington Post
8/27/2020
Lara Trump Seems To Have Gotten Her Abraham Lincoln Quote From A Meme — And It’s Wrong
Lincoln may have once shared the sentiment, just not the actual words.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian Magazine
8/17/2020
Read Thousands of Abraham Lincoln’s Newly Transcribed Letters Online
The missives, preserved by the Library of Congress, include notes to and from the beloved president.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
8/6/2020
1864 Elections Went on During the Civil War – Even Though Lincoln Thought it Would be a Disaster for Himself and the Republican Party
by Calvin Schermerhorn
Abraham Lincoln understood that the war for the Union was about the integrity of a constitutional republic, not the president or the party.
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SOURCE: CNN
8/11/2020
Trump has Never Even Read a 'Children's Book' about Abraham Lincoln: Douglas Brinkley (Video)
Douglas Brinkley recounts part of an interview with Trump in which the President's lack of erudition was revealed.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
8/7/2020
A New Statue Of Lincoln Will Adequately Honor Him Alongside Black Americans
by Frank Smith
The African American Civil War Memorial plans a different commemoration of Lincoln's role in emancipation.
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8/2/2020
Learning from Lincoln: Meeting Crisis with Action
by William L. Barney
The United States is at a crossroads. The path chosen will determine whether contemporary America resumes its role as a beacon of hope and progress to the rest of the world or joins the Confederate slaveholders of the past among history’s losers.
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7/26/2020
Lincoln, Cass, and Daniel Chester French: Homely Politicians Divided by Politics, United through Art
by Harold Holzer
In the age before the glare of television and instantaneous photography were relentlessly aimed at our leaders, politicians could succeed even if they looked like Lewis Cass. Or Abraham Lincoln.
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SOURCE: Washington Monthly
7/17/2020
Abraham Lincoln, Tech Entrepreneur
by Sidney Blumenthal
The president who created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, Abraham Lincoln, did more to advance the scientific revolution in American life than any chief executive of the 19th century.