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Movie Reviews
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Young Lincoln: The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1816–1830.
Prod. by Todd Gould. WFYI and the Indiana Historical Society, 2005.
27 mins. (American Public Television, 55 Summer St., Boston, MA
02110-1007; 617-338- 4455; <
info@aptonline.org
>; <
http://www.aptonline.org
> [Sept. 12, 2005])
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With the world apparently endlessly fascinated by Abraham Lincoln,
the Indiana Historical Society and WFYI-TV have produced a short
movie on the fourteen years he resided in the Hoosier state. The
film follows the familiar argument put forward by the historian
Louis A. Warren, author of Lincoln's Youth: Indiana Years, Seven
to Twenty-one, 1816–1830 (1959), that Lincoln's years
in Indiana were important to his future development and should not
be forgotten. While living near Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County,
he learned morality, history, and the fundamentals of the Founding
Fathers, and he became conscious of the possibilities available
in the wider world. As a boy, Lincoln read Mason Weems's biography
of George Washington, a biography of Benjamin Franklin, and a history
of the United States and thus acquired a grounding in the principles
of the American republic. Tragedy, too, shaped his character. The
death of his natural mother in 1818 to milk sickness, the descent
into madness of a childhood friend in 1824, and his sister's death
in childbirth in 1828 gave Lincoln his lifelong tendency to melancholia
and his penchant for sorrowful reflections on the finality of death.
Lincoln also traveled to New Orleans by flatboat in 1828, taking
a load of produce to market for James Gentry, where he purportedly
witnessed the horrors of the institution of slavery. When Lincoln
migrated with his family to Illinois in 1830, Indiana had left an
important mark on him.
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