By David J. Kent
Washington, D.C.
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Lincoln Group of DC members are likely familiar with the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln series of books. And now the online version of that series is expanding, as announced on February 15, 2025, by the Abraham Lincoln Association (ALA) in Springfield, Illinois.
Published in 1953 by Rutgers University Press and edited by Roy P. Basler, the original nine volumes (including the index) were largely funded by the ALA. These were supplemented by two more volumes in 1974 and 1990 containing additional letters and documents found by modern investigators. I can vouch for the critical importance of this collection for researchers and regularly pull the hard copy volumes (including the two supplementals) off my shelf to check specific letters and speeches by Abraham Lincoln over his lifetime. All of the original volumes (except the index) were later digitized and made available both on the ALA website and the University of Michigan Digital Collections system. This searchable online version has made it even easier to conduct valuable Lincoln research. But there was one gap— the supplemental volumes had never been digitized.
ALA has now filled that gap.
According to ALA's announcement, ALA secured the rights to the two supplemental volumes in 2023, and Michael Burlingame, James Cornelius, and Joshua Claybourn have been diligently transcribing, verifying, and digitizing the content. They have now completed that work, and the two supplemental volumes (X and XI for those keeping count) have been added to the ALA website as fully searchable PDFs. They still are not available on the U. Michigan digitized site, but you can find the PDFs on the ALA website and search your heart away.
Personally, I'm still an old-school kind of guy. I like having the hard copies of all eleven volumes on my shelf. But I readily admit to routinely searching keywords via the online digitized versions...and now I have a wonderful new resource to make that task even easier.
This isn't the only Lincoln scholarship that ALA has facilitated. Besides sponsoring the Collected Works, the organization helped support the creation of The Lincoln Log chronology of Lincoln's life and the regular publication of the For the People newsletter and the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, the primary journal for Lincoln research.
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