Part of a 15-City Tour

Tuesday, June 12, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, Union Theater
FREE, Open Seating
To make reservations, call (217) 558-8881

Books available for purchase.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and many other national publications. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Before he grew up and became a Washington reporter and editor, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff. Like so many sons of Illinois before him, he hung photos of Abe from his bedroom wall, memorized the Gettysburg Address and read himself to sleep at night with the Second Inaugural or the "Letter to Mrs. Bixby." Ferguson eventually outgrew his obsession. But decades later, just when he'd almost lost track of Lincoln completely, his latent buffdom was reignited by a curious headline in a local newspaper: LINCOLN STATUE STIRS OUTRAGE IN RICHMOND. "Lincoln?" thought Ferguson, "Outrage?" Feeling the first stirrings of the fatal question, the question that once, raised, never lets go: "Huh?" Ferguson went to investigate.

The result is LAND OF LINCOLN: Adventures in Abe's America (Atlantic Press), in which Ferguson embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between. He attends a national conference of Lincoln impersonators in Indiana; seeks out the premier collectors of Lincoln memorabilia from California to Rhode Island; attends a Dale Carnegie-inspired leadership conference based on "Lincoln's "management style;" drags his family across the threestate-long and now defunct Lincoln Heritage Trail; and even manages to hold one of five original copies of the Gettysburg Address. Along the way he weaves in enough history to hook readers of presidential biographies and popular histories