By Ed Epstein
Washington D.C.
December 27, 2024
Some greats are turning 90 years old in 2025--the Dalai Lama, DC Comics, the Social Security Act...and the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia.
And like those other 90-year-olds, the Lincoln Group is going strong. It's quite an accomplishment for a small, non-profit organization to not only last but to flourish for so long. As the group's current president, I attribute our nine decades of success to dedicated, hard-working members, of course, but most of all to Abraham Lincoln, whose wisdom and vision inspire us to try to educate ourselves and the general public about him.
In 2025, the Lincoln Group will look back over our history by including brief vignettes from our story at our monthly programs for members. But we will also use our 90th anniversary year to look ahead, specifically to 2026 and the nation's celebration of the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration was Lincoln's lodestar, the basis for his political philosophy. "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said in Philadelphia in February 1861 as he made his way to Washington to assume the presidency at a moment fraught with so much peril for the nation.
And of course, Lincoln's most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, was all about the unfulfilled promise of the Declaration. "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," he said on Nov. 19, 1863. A little arithmetic: 1863-87=1776.
The Lincoln Group is spearheading a consortium of Lincoln-related organizations and scholars to ensure that Lincoln's ideas stemming from the Declaration are front and center in the 2026 commemorations.
We are working to create a website that will discuss the many aspects of Lincoln's links to the Declaration. There will be a blog, a list of events planned for 2026, ideas for teachers and students to research, videos, and a social media presence to involve young people. We hope to unveil the website in 2025 and keep it going, busily, right through July 4, 2026.
But the Lincoln Group is doing much more. We'll have our monthly programs in 2025 featuring speakers offering the latest and best in Lincoln scholarship, one or more historical walking tours, perhaps some special events, and monthly meetings of our book study group, which reads and discusses in-depth books about the 16th president. Some of our programs are led by group members, whose scholarship is first-rate.
We are also active in many other ways. In 2024, we started funding fellowships for two PhD candidates at the Howard University history department to help pay the expenses for their research. Both students are delving into aspects of slavery, a topic very relevant to Lincoln.
Through our John Elliff scholarship fund, we pay for schoolteachers from across the country to come to Ford's Theater in Washington for a week in the summer to learn about ways to incorporate Lincoln's philosophy and leadership into their curriculums.
If you'd like to join the Lincoln Group and partake in our many programs and learn more about Lincoln -- by far the most written-about person in American history -- click on the "join now" drop- down at the upper right of the Lincolnian.org home page and join us.
And here's to another 90 years.
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