Abe Abroad
Project artists ARCHIVE have been very interested in international views on Abe (check out their photo of a Lincoln statue in Tijuana). And I’m interested in the ubiquity of Lincoln statues ( as per my blog post about Lincoln statues in my hometowns). So I was very interested to learn that there is also a Lincoln statue in Manchester, England.
Apparently the statue was errected in 1919 as a memorial to the support of the Manchester cotton workers for the Union. This article from the Manchester Evening News gives a bit more on the statu’s history. Here’s a more recent article talking about the statue (with a couple of Obama references thrown in). Of course what makes Manchester’s support of the Union so compelling is that their manufacturing interests linked them with the South, who supplied their cotton. As we face our current economic recession, it makes me wonder if I would be brave enough to support foreign policy that could very well make me unemployed.
