I won’t pretend that I’m providing you with a list of every book, article, or website that can help you and your students learn more about our sixteenth president – there’s just too much material to describe here. Instead, I’ll try to direct you to the best basic sources. Luckily, these include two websites (Lincoln/Net and Abraham Lincoln Online) that provide links that will take you to more specialized words and images, both online and on paper.

Lincoln/Net is the product of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, headquartered at Northern Illinois University. The project works with several libraries, academic institutions, and museums in Illinois that have contributed materials and expertise to the website. The website focuses on Lincoln’s life in Illinois, so it’s of somewhat limited use for Lincoln’s presidency but very useful for finding out about his pre-presidential political career. Here’s the URL:

http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/

The second website, Abraham Lincoln Online, provides information on Lincoln-related conferences and other current events, a basic bibliography (under “Books”), and full texts of Lincoln’s best known writings (under “Speeches and Writings”) with links to other online resources for broader collections of Lincoln’s papers. There are also links to sites that focus on regions of the country and houses relevant to Lincoln’s life (“Places”), links to a variety of “Resources” (libraries, museums, Lincoln organizations and periodicals, and even Lincoln re-enactors), and finally, useful “Education Links” (including a good list of lesson plans). A search mechanism allows you to retrieve information from all of these segments. Here’s the URL:

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln.html

Recent Books about Lincoln

Now I’ll turn to books about Lincoln. These are only the most recent and notable; their bibliographies can guide you back to earlier works:

Briggs, John Channing. Lincoln's Speeches Reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Gienapp, William E. Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Hanchett, William. Out of the Wilderness: The Life of Abraham Lincoln. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994. A convenient brief life (141 pages).

Wilson, Douglas L. Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Knopf. Distributed by Random House, 1998.

Zall, Paul M., ed. Lincoln on Lincoln. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Lincoln’s Papers

Brace yourselves – things really get complicated as I discuss how you and your students can access what we’d call Lincoln’s “papers” -- his correspondence, public papers, speeches, and professional records.

Fifty years ago, Rutgers University Press published the collected “Writings” of Lincoln. These eight volumes (with another volume of indexes) contain only materials that Lincoln wrote – the letters he sent to other people, not letters he received; public addresses he made, but not responses thereto, etc. This compilation is:

Basler, Roy P., ed.; Marion Dolores Pratt and Lloyd A. Dunlap, asst. eds. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Association, Springfield, IL; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55. Eight volumes plus index. Several volumes of supplements have appeared since 1955, adding Lincoln materials omitted from Basler's edition.

The Basler-edited volumes have been scanned, and their text converted to a form available on the Web. It appears on the University of Michigan Website, sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Association. Be warned, though -- the search mechanism for this resource is clunky as the devil. If you and your students can master it, though, it’s an invaluable tool to have. Here’s the URL:

http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln/

What about letters received by Lincoln and other materials addressed to him? The bulk of these were in Lincoln’s private papers, which eventually passed to the Library of Congress. The images of these manuscripts are available online in the American Memory series, and machine-readable transcripts are being prepared for the most significant materials. To access the Library of Congress Lincoln materials, go to:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html

For selections from Lincoln’s writings, use the Abraham Lincoln Online site or this convenient one-volume compendium:

Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865. Speeches and Writings 1832-1858: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates / Abraham Lincoln. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Distributed to the trade in the United States and Canada by Viking Press, 1989.

A Note on Other Online Sources

There is so much Lincoln-related material in our own Gilder Lehrman Collection that I can’t begin to list it. Go to the site’s search screen and type in your query (for example, “Abraham Lincoln photographs”) and see what you find. Remember that the camera icon tells you whether there is an image already online:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/index.php

American Memory at the Library of Congress has resources that don’t stop with the images of Lincoln’s private papers. Its Lincoln segment is called “Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library,” and it can keep you happily occupied for hours. Search for “Lincoln portraits.” for instance, and you’ll get thousands of results. In fact, if you search for almost any topic covered in this issue, you’ll have dozens of “hits.” Just go to this search screen and have fun:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html

Our friends at the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) provide helpful resources as well. See the PBS site, “The Time of the Lincolns,” in the American Experience series:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lincolns/tguide/index.html

And here are five sites hosted by the Lincoln Institute:

Mr. Lincoln's White House: http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org
Mr. Lincoln and Freedom: http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org
Mr. Lincoln and Friends: http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org
Mr. Lincoln and the Founders: http://www.mrlincolnandthefounders.org
Mr. Lincoln and New York: http://www.mrlincolnandnewyork.org