Understanding Lincoln: Writing-Intensive Seminar

3 units

This course explores the life, art (political and literary) and historical significance of Abraham Lincoln. It focuses first on how he understood himself and foregrounds his inspired conception of his own world-historical role in the Civil War. The course also traces how the larger world furnished the contexts of Lincoln's career, how his consciousness, speeches and writings, and presidential decisions can be understood against the backdrop of the revolutionary national democratic upheavals of the 19th century. Finally the course will investigate how the sixteenth president, so controversial in his day, has remained a site of cultural contestation, with historians, novelists, poets, cartoonists, filmmakers, advertisers, and politicians struggling over his memory and meaning, to the present.