02/16/09
Even with rooms full of books written about him, a week's worth of events recognizing the bicentennial of his birth and a new penny in his honor, the true mystique of Abraham Lincoln lies in what his story means to each American. That's the message historian and presidential scholar Richard Norton Smith will deliver Monday night in his Our Lincoln lecture at Transylvania University the Presidents Day cap to the recent Lincoln celebration. The journey from a log cabin in frontier Kentucky to being the 16th president of the United States is more than just an inspirational story. It symbolizes the best of what the nation was built on, which is probably the main reason people hold Lincoln so dear today, Smith said. "I think one reason that we go back to the well over and over and over again, he does embody what we like to think of as uniquely American," he said in a telephone interview last week. "It doesn't matter where you are born, it doesn't put limits on your life. And that's part of Kentucky's story." Smith, an author and former director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., is the latest speaker in Transylvania's Kenan Lecture series, named for university benefactor William R. Kenan Jr.
read more
