{"id":4108,"date":"2013-03-01T09:29:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T14:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=4108"},"modified":"2014-02-10T14:32:04","modified_gmt":"2014-02-10T19:32:04","slug":"teaching-lincolns-autobiography-in-the-common-core","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2013\/03\/01\/teaching-lincolns-autobiography-in-the-common-core\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Lincoln’s Autobiography in the Common Core"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1859<\/a>In the excitement over the new “Lincoln” movie and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning and truly mesmerizing performance as Abraham Lincoln, it is easy to overlook one of the very best sources of information on Lincoln’s life –Lincoln himself. \u00a0Abraham Lincoln never kept a diary or wrote a memoir, but he did craft a few, brief autobiographical sketches. \u00a0The most important of these efforts came in December 1859 at the request of a Pennsylvania newspaper (Chester County\u00a0<\/a>Times<\/a>)\u00a0<\/em>that was preparing a series on potential Republican nominees for president in 1860. \u00a0Joseph J. Lewis, publisher of the\u00a0Chester Times\u00a0<\/em>asked a mutual friend, Bloomington, Illinois attorney (and Pennsylvania native) Jesse W. Fell, to approach Lincoln for information that could be used to craft a profile.<\/p>\n

What Lincoln produced was a 600-word document that reveals a striking amount about his background and style. \u00a0You can access a written transcript of the sketch<\/a>\u00a0(along with the equally revealing cover letter to Fell, where Honest Abe states confidentially, “Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.”) along with a special audio version<\/a>\u00a0of the documents created for the House Divided Project by noted actor and Dickinson College theatre professor Todd Wronski. [NOTE: Just right-click on this audio link and select “Save Link As…” in order to download the audio file to your computer \/ network).<\/p>\n

\"ahtv_1860\"<\/a>For a Common Core-aligned assignment, students should read and listen to Lincoln’s autobiographical sketch and prepare a short informational essay that summarizes Lincoln’s life story using Lincoln’s own words. \u00a0After they have completed their essays and discussed them in class, teachers should show clips from Matthew Pinsker’s college-level discussion of Lincoln’s autobiographical sketch, which was filmed by C-SPAN’s American History TV<\/a>in 2010.<\/p>\n

For an extension exercise designed to teach research skills online, students should then read a clickable excerpt from Michael Burlingame’s Lincoln Prize-winning biography,\u00a0Abraham Lincoln: A Life\u00a0<\/em>(2008), which has been posted at Journal Divided<\/a> and further analyzes other efforts to craft Lincoln’s biography when he emerged as a presidential candidate in 1860. \u00a0 What \u00a0kinds of choices did Lincoln and his campaign biographers make when framing the main story of his life? \u00a0What do their choices reveal about what Professor Pinsker calls the “idiom” of nineteenth-century American politics?<\/p>\n

Common Core Alignments<\/strong><\/p>\n

Grades 6-8<\/em><\/p>\n