Abraham Lincoln

Presidents Day has been unmasked as a fraud . And the keepers of Abraham Lincoln's legacy are plenty mad about this travesty. It turns out that Presidents Day isn't really a formal federal holiday at all. Monday's official holiday was created to honor the birthday of George Washington, the nation's first president. Over the years, it has become known as Presidents Day, and most people think it honors both presidents. But the reality is that there is no federal holiday recognizing the 16th president, said Dave Blanchette, spokesman for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. RELATED: 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' "The state of Illinois wishes that Lincoln was placed on equal footing" with Washington, with a holiday all his own, Blanchette told The Times.

Presidents Day has been unmasked as a fraud . And the keepers of Abraham Lincoln's legacy are plenty mad about this travesty. It turns out that Presidents Day isn't really a formal federal holiday at all. Monday's official holiday was created to honor the birthday of George Washington, the nation's first president. Over the years, it has become known as Presidents Day, and most people think it honors both presidents. But the reality is that there is no federal holiday recognizing the 16th president, said Dave Blanchette, spokesman for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. RELATED: 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' "The state of Illinois wishes that Lincoln was placed on equal footing" with Washington, with a holiday all his own, Blanchette told The Times.

Bouncing down an empty country road, past browning cotton fields lined with signs advertising church services and cheap guns, historian John A. Lupton hunches over a minivan's steering wheel and ignores his aching back. He has been traveling for six days -- covering five states and more than 1,400 miles -- in a mentally exhilarating and physically exhausting pursuit of anything handwritten by Abraham Lincoln, as well as documents addressed to him: a frayed envelope the president addressed to a Confederate sympathizer; a dirty sheet of paper filled with the grumblings of a cotton farmer; a faded journal entry with notes about property rights that Lincoln scrawled in the margins.

Novelist David Nicholls' love story "One Day" begins when two recent college graduates spend an unlikely evening together, then charts their relationship over the next two decades by checking in on the pair once annually, on the same mid-July day. The book, which has topped bestseller lists in the United States and in Nicholls' native England, won praise for its unusual literary device, but when it came time for the author to adapt the story into...

The Civil War may have ended nearly 126 years ago, but according to Jason Robards some Southerners are still fighting the War Between the States. And most of those Southerners still hate president Abraham Lincoln. They even hate the actors who play Honest Abe, Robards discovered. In Madison, Ga., where tonight's "The Perfect Tribute" on ABC, was filmed, the locals generally greeted him with contempt, said Robards, who plays Lincoln.

The producers of a new video documentary scheduled to air tonight on the pre-presidential family life of Abraham Lincoln are attempting to shed new light on his relations with his controversial wife, Mary. The film, scheduled tonight at 8 on KCET and other public television channels in connection with the observance of Lincoln's birthday, is designed to give a unique view of the years the Lincolns lived in Springfield.

Want to meet an honest guy in a stovepipe hat? Burbank was the place this weekend, when it hosted the fifth annual convention of the Assn. of Lincoln Presenters. Who wants to dress up like a notoriously plain president who was assassinated before he was 60? At least 40 people, it turns out.

President Bush said Saturday that the United States is waging war in the Middle East against "evil that threatens world peace," and he urged Americans to "unite together in prayer" today. In a brief radio speech broadcast Saturday, the President said the presence of half a million U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf bears witness "to the fact that the triumph of the moral order is the vision that compels us." The President has declared today a National Day of Prayer.

Abraham Lincoln is much with us these days -- our new president reveres him and at times talks in his cadences. A raft of new books seeks to get at his mysterious power. And next week will be the 200th anniversary of his birth in a Kentucky cabin. To celebrate the anniversary, the Huntington Library has assembled an unusual show of Lincoln memorabilia -- objects that capture the man and the public's long fascination with him.

Mary Lincoln and the boys agreed that Mr. Lincoln should try for the nomination. So he went to Decatur, Ill., on a windy May 9 as delegates to the Republican state convention met in a rundown tent to decide his future. He walked into the tent and sat at the back. He worried as he listened to all the speeches. But Mr. Lincoln didn't have to worry long. William Seward's supporters couldn't find the votes needed to carry the state.

A 20-story floating city nicknamed Abe arrived Monday morning at the Port of Los Angeles, complete with several thousand giddy personnel who, throughout the day, donned civvies to storm Southland beaches and attractions as part of L.A. Navy Week. Hours earlier, the sailors had "manned the rails" — standing near the edges of the flight deck in their summer white uniforms as a tugboat towed the enormous Nimitz-class aircraft carrier into place. The Navy vessel returned in March to its home port of Everett, Wash., after a six-month deployment to the Persian Gulf, and is one of several ships in town for a grand show-and-tell this week.

"The Conspirator" has several allies in its earnest but effective quest to make a forgotten corner of America's past come alive. Many of those were planned, including the sine qua non casting of Robin Wright in the title role, but perhaps the most potent was an unintentional accident of history itself. The subject of this serious and seriously old-fashioned Robert Redford-directed film is an often overlooked aspect of an event every schoolchild knows about, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln less than a week after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant to end the Civil War. But there was more going on during the night of April 14, 1865, than John Wilkes Booth's attack at Ford's Theater.

Raymond Massey The lanky Canadian actor scored on Broadway in Robert E. Sherwood's historical drama "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" and earned an Oscar nomination for lead actor in the 1940 film version. Henry Fonda The Nebraska native perfectly captured Honest Abe's early years as struggling attorney in John Ford's 1939 drama "Young Mr. Lincoln," which earned an Oscar screenplay nomination for Lamar Trotti. Walter Huston The father of director John Huston and grandfather of Anjelica is the best thing about D.W. Griffith's first talkie, 1930's "Abraham Lincoln," which chronicles the 16th president's life from his early years to his assassination.

With his first mash-up, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," Seth Grahame-Smith started a cottage industry of classic tales woven through with horror. In "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," he reconstructs the story of Honest Abe to have him unleashing vengeance on bloodsuckers on his way to the White House. Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. 7 p.m. Thu. (626) 449-5320.

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter Seth Grahame-Smith Grand Central: 336 pp., $21.99 Queen Victoria Demon Hunter A.E. Moorat Eos/HarperCollins: 376 pp., $14.99 paper

BOOKS Seth Grahame-Smith Hot on the heels of his successful "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," the author and film producer turns his spoofing sights from British literature to American history with " Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." The amusing mash-up of fiction and fact has the 16th president avenging the unnatural death of his mother by ridding the world of vampires. Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd. 7 p.m. Free. (310) 659-3110. www.booksoup.com. COMEDY Sister Groundling The funny women of the legendary improv group's Main Company regale audiences with a one-off evening of sketch comedy, improv and other mixed media shenanigans.

The list of actors to have portrayed Abraham Lincoln on stage and screen is remarkably distinguished: Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook and Walter Huston, to name a few. This much-dramatized president is a mature actor's dream role, offering the chance to act out the weathered and self-doubting soul of an incontestably great man.

This month marked the 278th anniversary of George Washington's birth. The father of our country, born Feb. 22, won plaudits from historians for declining a third term as president, along with the wigs and titles that would have marked the presidency as a continuation of British royalty. Though usually viewed as a fable, the story of Washington as a youngster chopping down a cherry tree has been handed down for generations, a way for parents to teach their children that nothing is more important than telling the truth -- as Washington reportedly did in the face of his father's anger over the fallen tree.