Happy 200th, #16!

Four score and seven hours ago -- last weekend, in other words -- we took Aki to the Huntington to meet up with Ren, Christina, and Will. The Huntington has a Lincoln exhibit that runs through April and shows off some of the its impressive collection of letters, photographs, and other memorabilia related to the 16th president, including a life mask and cast of his hands.

Since Aki's Daddy spent the last couple of months reading Lincoln bios, he was totally psyched. Ren and Will are history buffs too -- Will was a history major and is a storehouse of facts and figures -- so we chitted, chatted, and traded anecdotes about the president who was recently rated by historians as our greatest.

We didn't count on meeting the President himself, though: Lucky Aki! Since we know you're going to ask, we'll just come right out and tell you: the beard is real.


Will, Christina, and us at the Huntington

With or without presidential exhibits, the Huntington is gorgeous year round. We were lucky enough to catch some cherry and plum blossoms this time around, and enjoyed strolling around the pond at the new Chinese Garden.

To bolster the festivities for Lincoln's 200th birthday, a Civil War band played several songs. Unfortunately, we just missed it. D'oh! Luckily for us, though, Ren brought his SLR.




Ren and Christina ain't whistlin' Dixie!

We can't take the credit, in fact, for any of the pictures in this post. They're all Ren! He took more pictures, too, especially of Aki. You can check them all out here.

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Hyperlinkin' Lincoln



So why all the fuss about Lincoln? Why are there more biographies written about him than anyone else in history (including Mohammed and Jesus of Nazareth)?

Undoubtedly, a large part of his myth is his martyrdom. Lincoln himself was quite fatalistic, and dreamt repeatedly of a strange boat that was taking him to some unknown shore. He was attracted by the Doctrine of Necessity, and once said that he confessed not to have controlled events, but that "events have controlled me."



In reading these biographies, I was chiefly struck by how he was self-taught, self-made, veering away from self-pity when tragedy struck him, unerring in his instincts and judgments, forgiving, confident, gifted, honest, moral, and the chief source of joy, laughter, and high spirits for those around him.

The most justice I could ever do to his name would be to recommend the two books I read: David Herbert Donald's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln and Doris Kearns Goodwin's blockbuster biography Team of Rivals. (You can click here for a free podcast of Goodwin's lecture at the Gilder Institute.)


The Rail-Splitter checking out his own exhibit

Cheesy as it sounds, iTunes University also has great resources, including more lectures and tracks of Civil War-era music. I also found the Gilder Institute's website pretty awesome.

Goodwin closes Team of Rivals with an account of how Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, discovered that by 1908, even a tribe in the wild and remote Caucasus, a people virtually cut off from civilization, knew of Lincoln and considered him to be "the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world."

Of Lincoln, Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wrote:

Why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes?

Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country -- bigger than all the Presidents together.

His supremacy expresses itself...in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

We are still too near to his greatness, but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.


Happy Birthday, Mr. President!