As a history professor, I sometimes think my job description is to reassure 18- to 22-year-olds that although the world we live in now may be terribly unfair, manifestly unjust, and poorly governed, not to worry, things have always been that way. If I were actually that cynical, however, my love for the U.S. history classroom would not have so long endured.

Still, 2024 filled me with foreboding. My list of worries was rooted in the desultory prospect of the Trump–Biden electoral clash, but included everything from Ukraine and Gaza to global warming. I felt enervated by the unavoidable feeling that Americans had incorporated so much distrust and anger into their identities that even conversations about the weather or sports could take an ugly turn. How was I to convey to my students the hopefulness that history also contains, to deploy the past as a resource when navigating rough seas?

I became obsessed with a figure at once close and ethereal: Abraham Lincoln. Steps from my office door resides one of only nine original Daniel Chester French bronze models of what became the famed Lincoln Memorial statue. What’s more, Matthew Simpson, the inaugural president of my university, delivered the martyred Lincoln’s eulogy in Springfield, Illinois. Two of Lincoln’s prominent early biographers, Jesse Weik and Albert Beveridge, are among my school’s graduates, sons of a state, Indiana, that proudly proclaims itself Lincoln’s boyhood home.

Daniel Chester French, Seated Lincoln, DePauw Art Collection. Located in the Department of History common area, DePauw University. Photo by author.

Lincoln’s ubiquity also makes him diffuse: He’s on our money, a luxury car brand, a massive financial services company, countless street signs, a classic children’s toy, a leftist brigade that fought Spanish fascism in the 1930s, an Aaron Copland musical composition, a 1960s Star Trek episode. If you are everywhere, who exactly are you?

Generous funding allowed me to immerse myself in Lincoln last summer to facilitate the launching of a new 100-level course on Lincoln. The course was likely to draw students looking for an intriguing way to fulfill an arts and humanities requirement and, with, any luck, would spark some future history majors and minors. My intention was to paint a richer picture for students of what good is possible—and what ills must not be resurrected—in a divided nation. I waded into the impossibly deep pool of Lincoln literature; I visited Lincoln sites in Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana. Come what might in November’s presidential election, I planned to have ready for spring semester 2025 a class that would paint a complex portrait of the man and his imprint on American life that transcended whatever meanness, let alone violence, might lie ahead.

I did not overestimate myself or Lincoln. In tracing his arc, I followed in the footsteps of an intimidating number of talented writers, artists, historians, and travelers who have been doing the same—sometimes with brilliant results—since Lincoln’s tragic death. I benefited immensely from their journeys.

Lincoln bookshelf. Photo by author.

I also understood the problems with looking to Lincoln for solace and support. Most of my scholarly work has told stories about American slavery and the deeply unsettling and incomplete process of abolition. I knew well, to use historian James Oakes’s phrase, Lincoln’s “crooked path” to emancipation. I have studied the founders and slavery long enough to know that the pitfalls of hero worship deepen when race becomes a central concern. That Lincoln presided over a shockingly destructive civil war makes deriving facile reassurance dicey. His armies restored a nation that had failed spectacularly.

And yet I found Lincoln the man and Lincoln the myth irresistible during Summer 2024’s deepening national discontent, which included an assassination attempt on one candidate and the implosion of a sitting president’s candidacy. I read up on Lincoln’s humble origins, his struggles with depression, his political ambitions, his ability to think historically, his cultural acuity, and his eloquence. At the summit was Lincoln meeting the historical moment to defend democracy, however flawed, by making immediate, mass emancipation both the means and the ends of the war. Lincoln had worked his historical magic on me. When I entered his Springfield tomb, a somber place for sure, and encountered another of the nine Daniel Chester French bronzes of the Lincoln Memorial statue, I felt our kinship confirmed.

Abraham Lincoln, President, US, Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, Series: Matthew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes, National Archives. Available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/23/5278/527823/content/arcmedia/stillpix/111-b/527823a.jpg

But my students—what did they feel? Was I just working through a highly intellectualized version of a mid-life crisis, or was I helping them to verbalize untapped needs in discussion and in writing? The course’s guiding presumption was that all who find themselves living in this country still live in the “Land of Lincoln.” Was that news to them?

Even with the aid of university-mandated student opinion surveys, how professors estimate their success in a given course is too bound up in ego to be reliable. But I can say this much with some confidence. For these 15 students, Lincoln emerged from the shadows, as did the process of history-making and myth-making. He was a reliable, idiosyncratic, and even entertaining guide to a great swath of U.S. history.

“Abraham Lincoln—The Hoosier Youth” (1932), by Paul Manship; in front of The Lincoln National Life Insurance Company building, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Photo by author.

In the 2007 book Land of Lincoln that we read for the course, journalist Andrew Ferguson observed that people tend to project onto Lincoln their own worldviews; Lincoln becomes a favored version of oneself, in temperament and ideology. Given the gale-force crosswinds that buffet even relatively privileged students in 2025, that outcome—Lincoln as self—would represent a win. The impression the students left me, however, is that something richer and more outward facing emerged. Student essays demonstrated that critical thinking and cynicism are not the same thing and that giving credit to Lincoln or to those who have deployed his memory requires just as much insight as finding fault. My fervent wish for the course was that in encountering Lincoln’s simultaneously sharp and diffuse legacies we recognize something of this country’s capacity. We should all wish for Lincoln’s humanity to enlarge our appreciation for humility’s relationship to greatness and moral progress’s relationship to power. If Lincoln can no longer do this work for us, the foreboding that launched the course can be summed up with this question: What land do we live in now? I am certain that when I teach the course to a first-year seminar in Fall 2025, that question will have only grown more urgent.