Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, delivered as the Civil War was in its final weeks, was one of most important in American history, featuring the immortal line, "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Michelle Krowl, the Library's Civil War and Reconstruction historian, explains how the day unfolded in this short video.
After the Union victory at Gettysburg in the Civil War in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln asked the nation set aside the fourth Thursday of November as a national holiday of thanksgiving. Congress made it official in 1870.
How would freed slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass have sounded while delivering one of his classic speeches? A speech on John Brown offers a few clues.
The Library and the History Channel teamed up several years ago to produce a collection of more than two dozen short, entertaining videos that showcased some of the Library's greatest, most unusual and startling treasures.
One summer night in the White House in 1862, John Nicolay, Lincoln's secretary, wrote his future wife a whimsical letter about how "all bugdom" was swarming his office, attracted by the light of gas lamp.
A conservator at the Library believes she has identified John Wood, an almost forgotten government photographer, as the man who took an iconic image of the first Lincoln inauguration.
Peggy Lundeen Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel J. Gibson. He fought for the Union during the Civil War and was incarcerated in the Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, in 1864. While there, he kept a daily log of his experience. Johnson was unaware of the diary until she encountered it on the Library’s …
