Abraham Lincoln and America, 1809-1865

This course surveys aspects of mid-19th century American culture through the life of Abraham Lincoln. This includes the imaging, ideologies, concepts, visions of behavior, institutions -- and the means for disseminating these -- which abounded in American life between 1848 and 1877, and which intersected at various points with the life of Abraham Lincoln. It pays attention to the emergence of markets for the arts and the restraints which those markets and 19th-century technology placed on them. The purpose is to have you at 'the cutting edge' of Civil War-era and Lincolnian cultural history scholarship.