Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
- Publish date: 08/01/2000
Schwartz explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions and how his reputation, over the next four decades, diminished and grew. Schwartz, links the vagaries of Lincoln's image to broad transformations of the nation, arguing that Lincoln's life symbolized America's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and articulated the roles of economic and political reform, military power, and nationalism in the country's self-conception.
Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp", acting as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities, The first part of a study that will continue through the present. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively, but around a real person whose character and achievementssymbolized his country's ideals.