Highlights Archives
Presidents, Presidents, Presidents
February 21 is Presidents Day. Few faces are more familiar to Americans than the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington on the $1 bill. There are other contemporary images of Washington, however, which you can see on our newly revised Wisconsin Historical Images pages. You can also view pictures of nearly all U.S. presidents in our collection devoted to politics and elections.
Washington never came to Wisconsin, of course, but the other icon of Presidents Day, Abraham Lincoln, made several trips to the Badger State. He fought here during the Black Hawk War in 1832, and returned in the late 1850s for campaign trips. Dozens of memoirs, interviews and other eyewitness accounts of the Great Emancipator are included in our online collection of Local History & Biography Articles.
More presidential material can also be seen in the February entries of our daily blog, Odd Wisconsin.
If you're within driving distance of the Society headquarters in Madison, you can also see three exhibits of rare books, manuscripts, and other documents related to American chief executives. On the first floor you'll find a rich selection of Lincoln materials that includes speeches he gave in 1860, Old Abe's Joke Book and other pamphlets from the 1864 election, engravings and memorial volumes following his assassination, and a selection of biographies dating from 1865 up through Mario Cuomo's recent book, Why Lincoln Matters. Also on the first floor is an exhibit of presidential inauguration programs and invitations that begins with Lincoln's 1861 inauguration and comes down through the decades to our own times.
On the second floor, in the Society's library, is an exhibit of original sources related to three presidential controversies. Did Wisconsin's founding father attack George Washington? Examine a 1755 newspaper account and a later oral history of the battle where this supposedly took place. Did Thomas Jefferson have an affair with a slave named Sally Hemings? Read the newspaper article where this allegation was first made, and see the results of modern DNA analysis. Was Abraham Lincoln secretly gay, as a new book alleges? Look at letters and a memoir on which this assertion rests, and make up your own mind.
Finally, on the fourth floor, in the Archives Research Room, is a selection of Lincoln ephemera that complements the first floor materials. It includes postcards, engravings, photographs, stamps, coins and even commemorative pottery devoted to the memory of Honest Abe. Better than any prose text could do, it shows how Lincoln was turned into a popular icon over the last 150 years.
:: Posted February 17, 2005
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