Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Lincoln's Birthday

Today is the birthday of our sixteenth president. Now you could wait another week for the lame congressionally invented excuse for a three-day weekend called "President's Day," or you can celebrated individual actual presidents and their individual actual achievements on their individual actual birthdays. We at the Opinionated Household opt for the latter, as you probably've guessed. (If I ever write a post on 10 Reasons We Go To The Latin Mass, this principle will be one of the reasons: Holidays, Feast Days, and Commemorations have meanings which are usually linked to their day of celebration. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to celebrate Ascension Thursday on Thursday--40 days after the Resurrection--and not on the following Sunday. Etc. But I digress.)

So if today is Lincoln's Birthday at your house too, here are a few resources we like. Please add your own, for any age up to and including adult. I need a good adult work on Lincoln to read.

Offspring #2 likes her old Step Up to Reading book, Meet Abraham Lincoln. It's still in print, but is now somewhat confusingly listed in the Landmark Books series, which great old series was originally intended for the middle school ages. In fact there are two Landmark books for older readers: Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House, which is in reprint, and Lincoln and Douglas: The Years of Decision, which unfortunately is not.

O2 this year moved up to Ingri D'Aulaire's Abraham Lincoln, heavily illustrated in the D'Aulaires' distinctive style. And we sang a round of "Old Abe Lincoln" from her Wee Sing America CD, which song by the way is how I happened to know that he was the sixteenth president without having to look that up on Wikipedia.

And Offspring #1? She's still finishing up Ferdinand and Isabella, but I think next it would be good for her to read Carl Sandburg on Lincoln.

Offspring #3 will have to be content for now with sucking on pennies.

Other Abraham Lincoln resources which I don't have, but wish I did and have been assured are good:

Abraham Lincoln's World. Genevieve Foster. Gives the broader historical context of what was going on world-wide in the mid-nineteenth century.

Abraham Lincoln: The Great Emancipator. From the Chidhood of Famous Americans series.

Other suggestions?

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