Abraham Lincoln

For Henry Louis Gates Jr., the challenge of making a documentary about Abraham Lincoln was daunting but ultimately too good to pass up. The only question was, which Abraham Lincoln? "I got this reading list, and every book I read had a different Lincoln in it," says the Harvard University history professor by phone from Washington, D.C.

More than 60 objects from President Abraham Lincoln's life are going on display at the National Museum of American History days before President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration, which will echo themes from the 16th president. The exhibit, "Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life," opens today and features the top hat Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated.

The Lincoln Anthology Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now Harold Holzer Library of America: 800 pp., $40 -- The Best American History Essays on Lincoln Edited by Sean Wilentz for the Organization of American Historians Palgrave Macmillan: 252 pp., $16.95 paper -- A. Lincoln A Biography Ronald C. White Jr. Random House: 798 pp., $35 -- Giants The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln John Stauffer Twelve: 448 pp., $30 -- Abraham Lincoln James M.

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.

Two hundred years after his birth, it's difficult to imagine there's anything new to say about Abraham Lincoln. The 16th and most universally beloved president has been analyzed, mythologized, deconstructed and reconstructed in pretty much every medium available to humanity. Books, films, poems and songs -- you name it, there's one about Abraham Lincoln. Every president in recent memory names him as a role model.

Tucked away in the second-floor library at USC's Gould School of Law, the Lincoln Reading Room houses a trove of rare books, family portraits, campaign memorabilia and other artifacts honoring one of the nation's most revered presidents. Law students using the room can't help but feel the presence of Abraham Lincoln as he gazes from an engraving of himself and his family in the White House.

For more than 150 years, Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch had been rumored to carry a secret message from the Civil War, supposedly written by an Irish immigrant and watchmaker named Jonathan Dillon. Dillon, working in a Maryland watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Ft. Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of the Civil War.

The flashlight beam lighted up the dark interior of Abraham Lincoln's left boot as if the inside of a tomb, and there at the bottom was the smooth and shiny indentation made by the martyred president's heel. The odor of fine leather still clung to the top of the boot, where the white cloth pull straps were sewn. When the light hit a maroon section of the hide, boot maker Michael Anthony Carnacchi whispered, "Aha. There's your original color."

David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and American South whose expertise on Abraham Lincoln brought him a wide general audience and reverence from his peers, has died. He was 88. Donald died of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston on Sunday while awaiting heart surgery, said his wife, Aida. A professor emeritus at Harvard University, Donald won Pulitzers for biographies of abolitionist Charles Sumner and novelist Thomas Wolfe.

Abraham Lincoln visited New York City only five times, and only once as president, yet the growing 19th century metropolis played a central role in burnishing his enduring public image. That's the point of a new exhibition, "Lincoln and New York," that opened Friday at the New York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. The exhibition runs through March 25. It begins with Lincoln's historic speech at the Cooper Union in 1860 and the iconic Mathew Brady photograph taken the same day, more than two months before he won the Republican presidential nomination.