Michael Burlingame says President Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Letter to Mrs. Bixby” may not have been written by Lincoln after all. The Lincoln scholar spoke Thursday at Knox College about his most recent publication, a two-volume biography, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life.” The book was the 2010 winner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Prize.
In his talk titled “What New Can Be Said About Abraham Lincoln?” Burlingame focused on the difficulties in finding information on Lincoln that has not already been uncovered and published.
“It’s easy to find letters that Lincoln wrote or received,” said Burlingame. “What’s really valuable and hard to find are letters about him. You have to do a lot of sifting through gravel, but if you’re willing to do that, you find a lot of information.”
Burlingame is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He was featured in a March 26, 2010, article in the Galesburg Register-Mail.
Download a PDF of the article:
20100326-GRM-Scholar-unearths-new-past.pdf
