Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
Plans Extensive Educational Outreach

Plans are now well underway by the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission (ALBC) to offer teachers, at all levels, balanced materials that can be used to help educators facilitate optimum learning and teaching experiences for students. As part of this comprehensive educational outreach, the commission hopes to develop materials that will be, like the man they commemorate, timeless. Sadly, teaching materials tied to national celebrations, are generally used only for the short term. The commission intends that materials and programs developed will remain useful well beyond 2009.

Spearheading the educational initiatives is Commissioner Darrel Bigham, a Lincoln scholar from Southern Indiana University in Evansville who heads the ALBC Education Committee. According to Bigham, the purpose of his committee is to “focus on enhancing knowledge and understanding of Abraham Lincoln in the K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities. Among other things, through its web site and printed materials, it is creating materials for teachers and students that will fit into existing curricular offerings. It is forming workshops and symposia for teachers as well as a variety of academic conferences and aims to support the publication and dissemination of Lincoln scholarship. The ALBC is collaborating with such national organizations as the Organization of American Historians, the National Council for History Education, National History Day, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute to maximize the use of resources.”

The lesson plans currently under development for Grades 7-12 explore a wide range of topics pertaining to Lincoln. “One of the goals of the Lincoln Bicentennial is to get more students and young people thinking about Lincoln and how he relates to their lives today. Making these curriculum materials available online will help us accomplish that,” said Jennifer Rosenfeld, Program Director of the ALBC. These lessons will provide a vehicle for students and teachers to explore Lincoln’s eloquence and its effect on his contemporaries. In addition to focusing on Lincoln, slavery and emancipation, race, and the Civil War, the lessons will also examine Lincoln’s legacy as documented in the arts, public sculpture, and his place among the pantheon of figures of international historical importance. “Lincoln’s earthly life ended 140 ago,” says Michael F. Bishop, the Commission’s Executive Director, “but his legacy lives on forever. These lesson plans will help teachers and students appreciate anew his extraordinary accomplishments.”

On college campuses across the country, such as American University in Washington, D.C., new history courses on Lincoln are being offered as electives. It is the hope of the ALBC that new courses are invigorated with the most recent and updated Lincoln scholarship. Historical relevance is often generational and new programs and scholarship is needed in order to groom the next generation of Lincoln scholars.

One of the goals of the Education Committee of the ALBC is to connect all related Lincoln historical sites across the country within a framework that links each site to one another. This would provide a cross pollination of ideas seminal to the Lincoln story in a dynamic effort to organize the resources available at each site and/or museum. The National Park Service, through its highly regarded Teaching with Historic Places Program, soon will have two lesson plans available from Lincoln Home National Historic Site in Springfield, Illinois, and Lincoln Boyhood Home National Monument in Lincoln City, Indiana, respectively. Angela Brown, Education Coordinator for Lincoln Cottage, a National Trust Historic Site, on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, in Washington, D.C., is hard at work developing educational programs and materials, with the hope that the President Lincoln and Soldier’s Home National Monument will become a premier historic site for public education about the Lincoln presidency. By providing an umbrella for these other educational programs the ALBC hopes to harness the collective power of public historians, academic historians, K-12 teachers, and students with a hope of broadening national consciousness about Abraham Lincoln and his singular role in American history.

“It is every American’s duty,” argued the late United States Senator, Paul Simon, in a speech delivered before the Lincoln-Douglas Society at Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, 2000, “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” Recently a survey was conducted outside “The Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” show at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Patrons exiting the half-hour light, sound, and audio-animatronics program were asked to offer comments on what they knew about Abraham Lincoln. Most individuals only responded that Lincoln was a great man, with very little understanding of what made him great. The educational outreach programs of the ALBC plan to counter this lack of historical literacy by ensuring that Americans of all ages come to a greater appreciation and a better understanding of Lincoln. The commission hopes that people will recognize that there is more to Lincoln and his life than what has often been portrayed through myth or the generic cardboard cutouts that are hung in classrooms, ensuring that all Americans “get right with Abraham Lincoln.”