Lincoln & the League

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Lincoln & the League By Allen Guelzo The Union League of Philadelphia has occupied the grand corner of Broad and Sansom Streets in Philadelphia since 1865, and, though it remains today one of the most vibrant social and professional organizations in the city, it takes great pride in putting its Civil War-era origins on display […]

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Standing Lincoln: A Biographical Monument to Abraham Lincoln and its Legacy

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In a one-hundred-year-old barn in Cornish, New Hampshire, Augustus Saint-Gaudens reshaped the memory of Abraham Lincoln in sculpture as he spent months turning blocks of clay into the 16th President of the United States. With his 1887 sculpture, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, commonly known simply as Standing Lincoln, Saint-Gaudens redirected the legacy of Abraham Lincoln in sculpture away from a romanticized Lincoln to a simplistic and naturalistic statesman, preparing to speak before an audience as he so often did.

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A Seldom Seen “Emancipator”

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Few artists did more to cement the reigning nineteenth-century image of Abraham Lincoln as “Great Emancipator” than Francis B. Carpenter, whose monumental canvas, The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet, won critical acclaim on national tour beginning in 1864 and inspired an 1866 engraving that remained a best seller for decades.

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