February is not only Black History Month, it’s also Lincoln’s month: birthday (the 12th); holiday (the 15th, tho he currently shares it with some old & about-to-be-canceled slaveholder named Washington).
Lincoln is an endlessly fascinating and enigmatic character. (And speaking of canceling, he just got tossed as namesake of San Francisco high school by a “progressive” school board.) And I’ve been learning some more about him recently from historian David Blight.
Lincoln is a major figure in the middle section of Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography last year, and deserved it.
The book is deeply researched, consistently insightful, splendidly written, and blessed with an endlessly quotable subject. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to finish it.
Not yet, that is.
