Odds and Ends

A number of stories caught my eye this week, but time did not allow me to bring them all to your attention. I thought we'd might do an "odds and ends" type post this morning:

• Thomas Kennedy, a Spencer County, Indiana artist, unveiled his new Lincoln Bicentennial painting on Monday. Kennedy hopes a print will hang in every school in his home state. The local news station Fox 7 WTVW covered the story, which you can view here.

• Barack Obama must be reading LincolnStudies.com. In the wake of Monday's post on the coveted Lincoln endorsement, Obama told voters in Boca Raton, Florida about Doris Kearns Goodwin's "wonderful book" Team of Rivals. "Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet because whatever, you know, personal feelings there were, the issue was, 'How can we get this country through this time of crisis?'" Obama said he would take the same approach as president. His rivals on the Democratic side, which include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd, might receive Cabinet positions. What about John McCain? "You know, if I really thought that John McCain was the absolute best person for the Department of Homeland Security, I would put him in there," Obama said.
  

• Daniel Mark Epstein has a new book, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage. I enjoyed his previous book Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington and am looking forward to this one. On Tuesday Andrew Ferguson, the author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, reviewed Epstein's latest offering for the Wall Street Journal.

• On a related note, both Epstein and Daniel Stowell, the Director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, will be appearing on Saturday, May 31st for a Virtual Book Signing. You can order signed copies of Epstein's book, as well as the four-volume The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases.

• Happy Memorial Day!