Austyn weiner biography of abraham lincoln

All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.
Charles M. Schulz

I think . . . if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there as many kinds of love as there are hearts.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

I’ve never had strong feelings about Valentine’s Day. I always thought it was a nice little holiday, reminding people to take a little time to celebrate the loving relationships in their lives. . . carefully chosen, or homemade)?

Apparently many people find Valentine’s Day offensive, and possibly even painful. Cara Paiuk wrote a long letter (reprinted in the Washington Post) detailing her many objections to school-mandated Valentine’s Day activities:

To my husband and I, Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday: a fabricated, hyper-commercialized event designed for retailers to peddle their wares and restaurants to fill seats. I also feel that it pressures couples to conform to a saccharine social norm while deprecating singledom, and I’ve seen people both in and out of relationships struggle with living up to the romantic expectations conjured by this collective cultural fantasy . . .Valentine’s Day is a cute and fun celebration of love to some, but it is a searing reminder of rejection, loneliness, and unrequited affection for many others.

If Paiuk had done a little research, she’d have learned that Valentine’s Day is far from a “Hallmark holiday”. The modern holiday is rooted in both ancient Roman traditions and early Christian history, and has been celebrated as St. Valentine’s Day since the 5th century A.D. Americans have been exchanging handmade valentines since the 18th century, and the first commercial valentines became available in the mid-19th century when Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts founded the New England Valentine Company.

Paiuk has come up with an alternative to making valentines out of constructio

  For a couple of years in the ‘90s I worked for a theatre at Lincoln State Park (www.indianasabelincoln.org)  in southwestern Indiana that presented an annual summer musical, Young Abe Lincoln. Lincoln’s boyhood years in Indiana from ages 7 to 21 were full of sorrow – he lost his mother and his sister there; much of his lifelong melancholy has its roots there – but crowds could flock to the park on a summer night to watch that story being told in song and dance.

The show was performed in a beautiful outdoor amphitheatre. On the drive to the theatre, one passed the churchyard where Lincoln’s sister, Sarah, is buried. Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, is buried across from the state park in what is now the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial (nps.gov/libo). Young Abe Lincoln was sweet and charming and it played fast and loose with the history.

One rejected marketing pitch for Young Abe Lincoln was “Walk in Lincoln’s Shoes by Day, Dance in Them at Night!” It wasn’t used but it made me smile.

The mythology and biography of Abraham Lincoln is in constant revision. In a timely discussion of unpopular U.S. Presidents not long ago, I mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was so disliked in many quarters that there were those who did not think he would live through his first inauguration.

Somebody said, “But everybody loved Lincoln.”

Such is the filter of time on history. Even though Lincoln is almost universally revered and practically deified today, he was widely reviled by many Southerners and Northerners alike when he assumed the presidency in 1861. Of course some were so fearful of his presidency that there was mass secession and civil war.

Even so, as an elementary school student in a still all-white public school in Birmingham during the height of the civil rights movement and the centennial of the American Civil War, my history lessons presented Lincoln as the epitome of goodness – loved and revered by all, the Great Emancipator, the man who brought unity from divisio

Editor's Note: The purpose of this column, which is published in Perspectives as space permits, is to recognize and honor the accomplishments of AHA members. Submissions are welcome; entries will be published in alphabetical order. To submit an entry, write to Cecelia J. Dadian, Senior Editor, AHA, 400 A St., SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

Terry Anderson (Texas Univ.) has been appointed the Mary Ball Washington Chair of American History, a Distinguished Fulbright Award, and will be teaching at University College, Dublin, for 2001–02.

Karl Appuhn (Univ. of Oregon) was awarded a Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Rome Prize Fellowship in Post-Classical Humanistic/Modern Italian Studies for 2001-02 by the American Academy in Rome.

Samuel H. Baron (independent scholar) has published Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford University Press, 2001), a study of a great strike that occasioned a massacre, mass trials, and an effective coverup.

Maurine H. Beasley (Univ.of Maryland) has edited (with Holly C. Shulman and Henry R. Beasley) the Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia (Greenwood Publishing Co., 2000) comprising more than 200 entries by eminent scholars and journalists concerning the career and life of one of the most important women of the 20th century.

Erving E. Beauregard (Univ. of Dayton) has published Notables of Harrison County, Ohio (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).

Morris Berman (independent scholar) published two books in 2000. Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (SUNY Press) and The Twilight of American Culture (W.W. Norton). Berman teaches part time in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at the Johns Hopkins University.

John M. Gates (Coll. of Wooster) has placed a 12-chapter anthology consisting of original essays and previously published work on his web page. Entitled The U.S. Army and Irregular Warfare, the anthology can be found athttps://www.wooster.edu/histo