Lincoln Research

My research and writing focuses primarily on Abraham Lincoln's youth. I am co-editor (with William Bartelt) of Abe’s Youth: Shaping the Future President (Indiana University Press, 2019), an annotated edition of Lincoln Inquiry papers. I'm currently working on an annotated edition of Edward Murr's papers on Lincoln's life in Indiana as well as a comprehensive history of Lincoln's youth.

I frequently serve as host of Lincoln Log, a podcast featuring conversations with leading historians and other officials about their stories, research, and wisdom. I appear as a featured historian in the six-part CNN documentary Lincoln: Divided We Stand.

I serve on the board of directors of both the Abraham Lincoln Association and Abraham Lincoln Institute, and I am a member of The Lincoln Forum, American Historical Society, and Organization of American Historians. I am past chair and a current member of the Southern Indiana Civil War Roundtable and first commander and current officer of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War John W. Foster Camp No. 2. I frequently serve as a featured speaker on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War.

• Hoosier Roots of Lincoln the Lawyer (forthcoming).
• “Abe Lincoln: An Acceptable Nickname?,” For the People, A Newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association 20, no. 3 & 4 (Fall-Winter 2018): 8.
• “We Need To All See The American Declaration As Abraham Lincoln Did,” The Federalist, 4 July 2017.

• Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress: The papers of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), lawyer, representative from Illinois, and sixteenth president of the United States, contain approximately 40,550 documents dating from 1774 to 1948, although most of the collection spans from the 1850s through Lincoln’s presidency (1861-1865). Roughly half of the collection, more than 20,000 documents, comprising 62,000 images, as well as transcriptions of approximately 10,000 documents, is online.
• Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: In 1947 the Abraham Lincoln Association (ALA) launched one of the most significant projects in Lincoln studies—a definitive edition of all the papers written by Abraham Lincoln under the direction of Roy Basler. The ALA, in cooperation with the University of Michigan, has made Basler’s work freely available online.
• Abraham Lincoln: A Life: In 2008, Johns Hopkins University Press published Michael Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life. His long-awaited two-volume opus came in at nearly two thousand pages, but the original version was even longer. As a result, Burlingame reached an agreement with his publisher to offer the unedited manuscript—larger in both narrative text and more exhaustive in documentation—online, free of charge.
• Friends of Lincoln Collection: Friends of the Lincoln Collection of Indiana, Inc., launched a website serving as an additional gateway to the thousands of digitized Lincoln era letters, photographs, newspapers, books, and other items from the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection. In addition, it posted searchable archives from the more than 1900 issues of Lincoln Lore, a nationally recognized magazine for scholarly articles, interviews, book reviews, and announcements of local and national Lincoln-related programs and events. The site will also offer other items of interest, including links to Collection items displayed in the Fine Book Room of the Allen County Public Library; online exhibits; dozens of viewable Lincoln presentations at the library; and educational support from resident Lincoln historians.
• The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition: Beginning in 1985, participants in the Lincoln Legal Papers project traveled throughout Illinois collecting photocopies of every document pertaining to a legal case involving Lincoln. After fifteen years piecing together Lincoln’s legal career one document at a time, the editors released their database to the world. It includes thousands of legal case descriptions, as well as more than one hundred thousand legal documents, affidavits, court dockets, fee books, newspaper articles, and letters.
• Ida Tarbell Papers: This collection encompasses Ms. Tarbell’s professional life as a journalist, author, and lecturer, including several hundred pages of notes she compiled while researching her articles and books on Lincoln. The Ida Tarbell Papers are housed online via her alma mater, Allegheny College, in Pennsylvania.
• Abraham Lincoln Association—Virtual Publications: The Abraham Lincoln Association website offers researchers access to digital versions of the association’s most popular publications, including monographs and every issue of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
• House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College: Matthew Pinsker’s House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College offers researchers a look at the Civil War era through the prism of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, from which both James Buchanan and Roger B. Taney graduated. There is also a substantive Lincoln-Douglas debates site, as well as another section that analyzes Lincoln’s writings, which was the product of an innovative online course in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
• Abraham Lincoln Online: Created, written, and published by Rhoda and Lowell Sneller, Abraham Lincoln Online has been around for over a couple decades and remains a great central location for all things Lincoln, from breaking news and upcoming events to book announcements and author interviews.
• The Abraham Lincoln Research Site: Created in 1996 by former history teacher Roger J. Norton, The Abraham Lincoln Research Site is a portal to dozens of links particularly suited for students and teachers, including a variety of classroom activities and lesson plans. The resource also offers research sites for the Lincoln assassination, the life of Mary Lincoln, and a discussion board called the Lincoln Discussion Symposium.
• Lincoln/Net: This resource, hosted by Northern Illinois University, features lesson plans and uses Lincoln as a vehicle to examine larger social and political themes from his era.
• The Lehrman Institute: This resource offers a diverse collection of sites devoted to students who want to learn more about Lincoln’s life and legacy. In addition to supporting the annual Lincoln Prize, which recognizes the best printed and electronic work on the Civil War and Lincoln, as well as the Hay-Nicolay Prize, awarded to the best doctoral dissertation about Lincoln, the Lehrman Institute has published and maintains eight different websites, such as Mr. Lincoln’s White House and Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom.
• The Lincoln Forum: The Lincoln Forum is an assembly of people who share a deep interest in the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. Through a roster of activities and projects including symposia, tours, student essay competitions, teacher scholarships, a newsletter, and annual awards to recognize special contributions to the field of Lincoln studies, the Forum endeavors to enhance the understanding and preserve the memory of Abraham Lincoln.
• The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: The Papers of Abraham Lincoln has launched an incredibly ambitious documentary editing project aimed at making high-quality digital scans of every document Lincoln wrote or received. They also intend to transcribe, annotate, and cross-reference the documents to make the collection especially useful to researchers. They envision a database that may grow to include two hundred thousand documents.
• Abraham Lincoln: A History: Published in 1890, Abraham Lincoln: A History is a ten-volume account of the life and times of Abraham Lincoln written by John Nicolay and John Hay, who were Lincoln's personal secretaries during the Civil War.

Most of the resources and their descriptions featured in this section are derived, and in some cases copied directly, from Samuel Wheeler, "Building a Twenty-First-Century Lincoln Memorial: The Digital Revolution in Lincoln Studies Scholarship," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 37, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 30-47, available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0037.105.