Lincoln: so hot right now
Centennials and bicentennials always inspire a strange fever. Abraham Lincoln’s 200th, however, has prompted more madness than usual.
I wish I were referring to Lincoln impersonators, or mass recitals of the Gettysburg Address, or those Plexiglas trees around the faux-log cabin on display at the new Lincoln museum. But I’m actually talking about something weirder: our current President’s unblushing abuse of Lincoln iconography.
For a while, we were with him. His campaign kick-off at Springfield’s Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once spoke of a “house divided,” was meaningful...
This event was also co-sponsored by Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition as well as by the English Department.