Looking at Lincoln (original) (raw)

The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon

The Journal of American History, 2002

Nearly a century and a half after his death, Abraham Lincoln remains an intrinsic part of the American consciousness, yet his intentions as president and his personal character continue to stir debate. Now, in The Lincoln Enigma, Gabor Boritt invites renowned Lincoln scholars, and rising new voices, to take a look at much-debated aspects of Lincoln's life, including his possible gay relationships, his plan to send blacks back to Africa, and his high-handed treatment of the Constitution. Boritt explores Lincoln's proposals that looked to a lily-white America. Jean Baker marvels at Lincoln's loves and marriage. David Herbert Donald highlights the similarities and differences of the Union and Confederate presidents' roles as commanders-inchief. Douglas Wilson shows us the young Lincoln-not the strong leader of popular history, but a young man who questions his own identity and struggles to find his purpose. Gerald Prokopowicz searches for the military leader, William C. Harris for the peacemaker, and Robert Bruce meditates on Lincoln and death. In a final chapter Boritt and Harold Holzer offer a fascinating portfolio of Lincoln images in modern art. Acute and thought-provoking in their observations, this all-star cast of historians-including two Pulitzer and three Lincoln Prize winners-questions our assumptions of Lincoln, and provides a new vitality to our ongoing reflections on his life and legacy.

An Unrecognized Apotheosis Image of Lincoln

was educated in engineering and management and had a career in product development, marketing, and patent licensing. He notes that skills developed in these career areas require tenacity and detailed research, some of the same skills that are also necessary for historical research. His wife's interest in both art and the Civil War inspired his research and this article.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE LOST DAGUERREOTYPE ?

Nicephore, 2025

An anonymous image surfaced during a bustling New York photo fair, coinciding with the AIPAD New York Photo Week in a recent year. The portrait depicts a man bearing a striking resemblance to President Lincoln. While it’s possible that this individual could be a Lincoln look-alike, it’s crucial to understand the historical context of this image’s creation. The portrait is a daguerreotype, a photographic process that by 1860-1861 had abruptly and almost completely vanished from use. This rapid disappearance coincided with the period when Lincoln was contemplating growing his iconic whiskers after his election as President. The daguerreotype, invented in 1839, was the first commercially successful photographic method. However, its decline in the late 1850s was swift and absolute. By 1860, the daguerreotype had been almost entirely supplanted by newer, more efficient techniques such as the ambrotype and the collodion wet plate process. The transition was so complete that by 1861, only a handful of studios in major cities could still produce daguerreotypes, and even these were rare. All the American men who wished to ressemble the President started to grow their beard only after the daguerreotype process vanishes. Then, if the model is not a Lincoln look-alike, if Lincoln has no twin, what can we consider ? Therefore, if we eliminate all those who wished to ressemble him, what is the probability of a natural doppelganger existing for such an extraordinary figure ? And without any comment at any moment ? It was logical to search for documented traces of a daguerreotype at the frontier moment when Abraham Lincoln began growing his beard. The intriguing possibility arises: could this anonymous portrait be the long-lost daguerreian image of President-elect Abraham Lincoln? Lincoln biographers and iconographers have long mentioned the existence of this elusive portrait, reportedly taken during a stop on Lincoln's inaugural journey in Clyde, NY, in February 1861. This information raises the tantalizing prospect that the anonymous portrait may, indeed, be the missing daguerreian likeness of President Lincoln. However, the definitive confirmation of this theory hinges on further evidence and verification. The essay provides readers with information and evidence to consider, allowing them to form their own opinions or convictions about the portrait's identity. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to determine whether they believe this portrait could be the elusive daguerreian portrait of President Lincoln, based on the presented information. We encourage everyone to form their own opinions, as it is equally relevant to validate the cluster of clues, as it is to explore any evidence that might challenge this intriguing hypothesis.

SLAVE PHOTOGRAPHS IN LINCOLN

I n interviews, Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner said that he experienced a breakthrough during the writing process when he realized that the story of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment is largely a story about white men who had no personal experience of slavery. 1 In light of this realization, and the fılmmakers' related choice not to include slaves themselves as a part of the story, the fılm's use of slave photographs is worth exploring. By depicting young Tad Lincoln and President Lincoln consuming photographs of slaves, the fılmmakers use photography to put characters in visual relation to slavery and invite reflection on photography's capacity to fuel the desire to look. Furthermore, the slave photographs erupt into the story at moments when the fılmmakers want to emphasize how timely political calculation needs to be balanced with moral imperative.

Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

This essay studies letters written to McClure's magazine in response to its 1895 publication of a previously unknown photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The letter writers mobilized what I call "image vernaculars," enthymematic arguments grounded in their social knowledge about photography, portraiture, and "scientific" discourses of character such as physiognomy. Armed with these image vernaculars, viewers argued the photograph was evidence of Lincoln's superior moral character, and they used it to elaborate an Anglo-Saxon ideal national type at a time when elites were consumed by fin-de-siècle anxieties about the fate of "American" identity.

2017

Recent scholarly works on Lincoln seem to cover every imaginable focus, perspective, and subject area7. I split up this abundance of publications into two main areas of interest, which facilitates this assessment: Firstly, those publications focusing on his lifetime from 1809 to 1865, including emphases on his private and professional life, and, secondly, those studies 6 Frank J. Williams speaks of "more than seven hundred books [about Lincoln being published] between 2007 and 2011" (2012, 89).

Abraham Lincoln: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay

2007

In this slim collection a distinguished editor and biographer presents eleven brief excerpts from the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History, by his devoted secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay. The introduction, Nicolay and Hay: Court Historians, appeared in the Winter 1998 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Readers of that masterful summary may have no need of this book. Burlingame displays his usual sensitivity to male relationships, comparing the affection between Lincoln and Hay to that between George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, though he errs in making Hay, an Ivy League snob, nineteen years younger than his boss; he was actually the junior by twenty-nine years. Non-specialists are apt to be misled by much of the content of the fewer than 65 pages Burlingame has cherry picked from the mammoth biography. Partly serialized in the Century Magazine, 1886-1890, and published as books in the latter year, few today, even among Lincoln specialists, have read the entire 4,709 pages. Scholarly assessments changed almost completely from the late 1880s, when James Ford Rhodes praised it, to 1939 when Allan Nevins condemned it. Burlingame argues that Carl Sandburg could not have begun his own life without it. Other biographers had to rely on it until the opening of the Lincoln papers in 1947, followed two years later by the publication of Hay's diary and Nicolay's memos of presidential conversations. Now, except for hardcore Lincoln idolaters, including the current clique of court historians, most readers will find even the brief excerpts from this panegyric hard to stomach. The contrast between Burlingame's scholarship and Nicolay and Hay's hagiography is often jarring.

2017

Looking at Lincoln (original) (raw)

Related papers