Lincoln Studies at the Bicentennial: A Round Table

Lincoln Theme 2.0

Matthew Pinsker

Early during the 1989 spring semester at Harvard University, members of Professor David Herbert Donald's graduate seminar on Abraham Lincoln received diskettes that offered a glimpse of their future as historians. The 3.5 inch floppy disks with neatly typed labels held about a dozen word-processing files representing the whole of Don E. Fehrenbacher's Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait through His Speeches and Writings (1964). Donald had asked his secretary, Laura Nakatsuka, to enter this well-known collection of Lincoln writings into a computer and make copies for his students. He also showed off a database containing thousands of digital note cards that he and his research assistants had developed in preparation for his forthcoming biography of Lincoln.1 There were certainly bigger revolutions that year. The Berlin Wall fell. A motley coalition of Afghan tribes, international jihadists, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Virginia voters chose the nation's first elected black governor, and within a few more months, the Harvard Law Review selected a popular student named Barack Obama as its first African American president. Yet Donald's venture into digital history marked a notable shift. The nearly seventy-year-old Mississippi native was about to become the first major Lincoln biographer to add full-text searching and database management to his research arsenal.	1
More than fifty years earlier, the revisionist historian James G. Randall had posed a question that helps explain why one of his favorite graduate students would later show such a surprising interest in digital technology as an aging Harvard professor. "Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?" was the title of Randall's provocative 1936 state-of-the-field essay in the American Historical Review.2 Such questions about topics being "exhausted" are never easy for academic historians to contemplate, and they become even more difficult to swallow when they are asked decades before the completion of yet another biography on the subject.	2
In the late 1980s, David Herbert Donald helped pioneer the use of full-text searching within the field of Lincoln studies by overseeing the compilation of floppy disks containing files with dozens of Abraham Lincoln's writings. Today, most students of the subject can access millions of online pages of Lincoln-related documents instantly from their desktops. Photo by John Osborne. Courtesy House Divided Project, Dickinson College.
Even though Randall's answer, coming about seventy years after Lincoln's death, was a "confident negative," the question about whether the field is exhausted has continued to haunt Lincoln studies. After all, what could scholars claim about a subject that Randall labeled in the 1930s as "the most overworked in American history"? Though the great revisionist had dismissed much of the previous material on Lincoln as uninformed and unimportant, noting primly that "the hand of the amateur has rested heavily upon Lincoln studies," such was not the case in the decades between Randall's article and the preparation of Donald's 1995 biography. Responding to Randall's "call" with his own widely discussed state-of-the-field essay in 1979, Mark E. Neely Jr. observed that "Professionalism has been the major development in" Lincoln studies. Thus when Donald entered the arena in the late 1980s after a career spent "around the periphery of Lincoln," as he put it, armed with diskettes and databases (and even with his own personal microfilm reader), the prize-winning biographer had an obvious determination to find something new to write about a figure who had been overworked by amateurs and thoroughly reworked by professionals.3	. . .