A journalism instructor on Lincoln the writer

Kevin Coyne, who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, discusses the lessons writers should learn from Lincoln:

Writing doesn’t get much clearer than the Gettysburg Address, the first thing I ask my students to read. It’s barely a third of the length of an op-ed column. As Garry Wills has memorably pointed out, Lincoln is reimagining America from the very first line, by taking Jefferson’s words to heart in a way that the slaveholding Jefferson himself did not, and by elevating the Declaration of Independence, with its promise that “all men are created equal,” above the Constitution, which reneges on that promise, as the defining document of our nation. If you’re going to ask a boy from Maine to die fighting a boy from Georgia in a field in Pennsylvania, you’d better be clear on why, and he was.

How might cable news have covered the Gettysburg Address?

Robert Brustein has a tongue-in-cheek take on this question.

Lincoln’s birthday around the Web

Here are a few links to enjoy as you celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s 203rd birthday.

• Here’s an interesting piece on Lincoln’s changing image in popular culture.
• Contrary to widespread belief, Lincoln’s birthday is not commemorated in any official national holiday.  The Christian Science Monitor explains why.
• Does the GOP still wear the mantle of its first president?  The chairman of Delaware’s Republican State Committee says yes, while Jackie Hogan argues that Lincoln would be a hard sell among today’s Republicans.
• California kindergarten students find memorizing the Gettysburg Address to be nothing they can’t handle.
• A supposed portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln that one adorned the governor’s mansion in Springfield, IL was, as it turns out, created to defraud Lincoln’s descendants.
• Finally, here’s a report on the new Center for Education and Leadership, which opens this month as the latest addition to Ford’s Theatre.

National Park Service may take on stewardship of Gettysburg Address train station

The train station in Gettysburg at which Lincoln arrived on his trip to deliver his famous cemetery dedication speech may become part of Gettysburg National Military Park.  The station is just a short distance from the David Wills House, where Lincoln stayed during his visit to Gettysburg; the NPS took over the management of the house in 2004, and re-opened it to the public in 2009.