Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bennett's book is only one side of a sharp argument over Lincoln and race, but its success served as a sharp reminder that--just as in all previous times--modern America will insist on seeing Lincoln on its own terms. Consider C.A. Tripp and his argument that Lincoln was gay. His book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln begins with the fact that Lincoln during his late 20s and early 30s shared a bed with a young man named Joshua Speed. As President, Lincoln may also have shared his bed with a captain of his guard unit in Washington...
...common and as mundane as men sharing houses or apartments in the early 21st. Tripp's claim proceeds from what Jonathan Ned Katz calls "epistemological hubris and ontological chutzpah." A scholar of 19th century sexuality, Katz explains that the terms homosexual and heterosexual did not exist in Lincoln's time, and that fact is just one piece of evidence that the concepts of gender, sexuality and same-sex relationships were radically different in Lincoln's world. In those days, men could be openly affectionate with one another, physically and verbally, without having to stake their identity...
...make of the personal life of a leader so long encrusted in mythology? Fortunately, we've never been in a better position to see him. Along with new interest in the private lives of public figures, new trends in scholarship allow us a fresh chance to see Lincoln as he lived, thought and acted. Following the boom in oral history in the 1960s, today's Lincoln scholars are closely studying the massive body of recollections from people who knew him well, including intimate portraits that had long been neglected or obscured. In the past decade, more than a dozen volumes...
Then there's the Internet. It is possible to word-search, online, Lincoln's collected speeches, his known activities on each day of his life, his incoming correspondence and other ephemera at the Library of Congress and a vast array of primary sources from the 19th century, including letters, diaries and memoirs...
Those new historical tools can be easily abused, allowing writers with a fixed idea to go fish out evidence to support their claim. To do his research, Tripp took 80-some volumes of crucial Lincoln material, shipped them off to India to be digitized and put the results into a database. Then he did his research the new-fashioned way, by typing terms in a search bar. Presumably, a search for various body parts yielded the delicious bit that Lincoln's New Salem, Ill., friend William Greene considered his thighs "as perfect as a human being's could...