Category: Arts & Humanities, Brown University, Abraham Lincoln, United States
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About This Collection This database comprises sheet music from the McLellan Lincoln Collection at the John Hay Library and includes material written between 1859 and 1923. Music written about Lincoln ranges from popular song to compositions for orchestral performance. Although the focus is on Abraham Lincoln, these pieces offer an important resource for understanding the popular context of Lincoln’s life and presidency and, later, the significance of his legacy in American life. Between 1859 and 1865, popular music about Abraham Lincoln proliferated. Much more than simply suggesting 19th century musical fashions, Lincoln songs are an important source for understanding popular attitudes towards the Illinois candidate, later the 16th President, and his policy agenda.
Center for Digital Scholarship Box A, Brown University Providence, RI 02912 The Museum Objects of the McLellan Lincoln Collection View into McLellan Lincoln rooms, John Hay Library. A lock of Lincoln’s hair. A hammer owned by John Wilkes Booth. A ruler used by Lincoln in the White House. A cane made from walnut rail split by Lincoln. A block of wood from the house where Thomas Lincoln married his second wife, Sally Johnston. A piece of wallpaper taken from Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater. These numinous objects are just a few of the many strange yet fascinating pieces which have found their way into Brown’s McLellan Lincoln Collection. In 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. purchased the Charles W.
About This Collection The Hay Library’s famed collection of manuscripts authored or signed by Lincoln, now comprising nearly 1,100 pieces in all, represents the accumulation of many years of active collecting by private individuals and Friends of the Brown University Library. These materials came to the Library in a number of ways. The original core of the collection included 134 manuscripts by Lincoln and another 183 by close associates of Lincoln. These materials came to the Library in 1923 as part of the Lincoln collection compiled by Charles Woodbury McLellan, one of the five great Lincoln collectors in the early 20th century. Since then, manuscripts have been added both by gift and by purchase. The first major addition to the collection was made by John D.
Center for Digital Scholarship Box A Brown University Library Providence, RI 02912 cds_info@brown.edu About This Collection Researchers may note some overlap between Lincoln Graphics and Lincoln Broadsides. Indeed, the line between a broadside and a graphic representation can be hard to define. In general, however, graphics will contain more image than text, while for broadsides that relationship is reversed. Brown’s Lincoln Graphics collection is immense, and researchers are cautioned that this digital collection presents only a portion of it. We hope to digitize more of the collection in due course, but this will take time.
