Comment from Alexis Lerro about my articles on Abraham Lincoln

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:04 AM, 21st Century Abe wrote:

Dear Professor,

Abraham Lincoln is turning 200 in February, and we want you to celebrate his bicentennial with us!

We've read your site Where Knowledge is Wealth and think you'd be interested in hearing about our project because your blog has several posts citing Lincoln.

My name is Alexis Lerro and I work for a company called Lime Projects based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For the last month or so, we have been helping the Rosenbach Museum & Library get ready to launch an exciting new project called "21st-Century Abe" to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Abe Lincoln's birth.

21st-Century Abe grew out of an awareness that there is an intense interest in Lincoln among the great number of web-savvy folks who spend much of their days surfing the net, as the abundance of Lincoln-themed YouTube videos and MySpace pages will attest, but that he is almost exclusively represented and discussed in a mythical and clichéd way. The goal of 21st-Century Abe is to engage this audience in exploring a nuanced and complex view of Lincoln and to create a community of dialogue (both textual and artistic) around contemporary issues that grow out an understanding of Lincoln's historical materials. The organizing themes of the project include Lincoln's views on race, his patterns of thought and rhetoric, and his role as a celebrity, both in his own day and ours.

In addition to the blog the Rosenbach has started, there will be a full website launch on February 12^th , Lincoln's 200^th birthday, and exciting contributions from scholar and author Douglas Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center and respected Lincoln academic; visual artist Maira Kalman, author and illustrator of numerous children's books and illustrator of the illustrated version of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style; composer and rock musician Bryce Dessner, (member of the band The National); and multi-media artists Archive (Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick) as they reflect on Lincoln documents and provide their own creative interpretations.

But we're not stopping there! Your responses—in words, songs, videos, photos, drawings, web links, whatever — define 21st-Century Abe. With the full site launch, we invite you to contribute your own Abe finds and interpretations and maybe even win one of our Abe contests.

After researching many blogs on the subjects of history, civil war reenactment, art, politics and education, we are excited to share 21st-Century Abe at the Rosenbach with your website, Where Knowledge is Wealth.

The 21^st -Century Abe blog is located at the following URL: http://www.21stcenturyabe.org

Plus there are great supplementary Abe media sites like:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/21stCenturyAbe
Bebo: http://www.bebo.com/21stCenturyAbe
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/21stcenturyabe

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=1586996051&ref=profile&pub=2309869772

Let us know what you think about it! If you like it, pass it along and tell a friend, or even post about it on your blog.

Thanks for your time—we hope to hear from you on our blog and website, and if you're in the Philly area, we hope to see you at the Rosenbach's festivities!

Sincerely,

Alexis

Alexis Lerro
Production Manager and Research Coordinator
Lime Projects
abe21@limeprojects.com
tel. 267.886.9224