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Friday Favorites: Digital Lincoln

President LincolnToday marks what would have been the 201st birthday of President Abraham Lincoln. A lover of everything presidential history, I thought I would share some of the things you can find online related to the 16th President.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library located in Springfield Illinois can be found on the Web, on Facebook, on Twitter, and YouTube. The library features many high-tech attractions including a holographic Lincoln!

The Lincoln Institute runs a number of informative sites including, Mr. Lincoln’s White House and Mr. Lincoln and New York.

You can read selected Lincoln speeches and writings or for those more daring the collected works of Lincoln.

There is a long list of Lincoln-related news and events throughout the year and of course, who doesn’t love Lincoln’s role in Disney’s Hall of Presidents?

In honor of the day my personal recommended reading is Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The second shortest inaugural in presidential history and given one month before his assassination,  the speech is almost as complex in context as the man who gave it. Somber in tone, Lincoln opens by noting the stark difference in occasion between his this address, given at the end of the bitter Civil War, and his first, given on the eve of that War.

The speech is a justification of the war which Lincoln had campaigned against before becoming President. It is also a written recognition that a great deal still laid ahead for the post-War nation, especially the bitterness that was brewing over Reconstruction.

In the audience were six men conspiring to murder the President, his Vice President Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William Seward. One of those conspirators was Lincoln’s very assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Lincoln ended the address by saying:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Quick Non-Lincoln Hits


This entry was posted posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Favorite Fridays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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