Home YouTube Facebook

Finding Abe

21st-Century Abe was active February 12, 2009-August 31, 2009.

To mark Lincoln’s 200th birthday we explored why we in the 21st century are still obsessed with this 19th-century man. Abe is everywhere, from advertising to political punditry. What does this popular Abe have to do with the historical Abe? 21st-Century Abe took six months to tackle these questions. We asked scholars and artists to get the ball rolling, but visitor responses have defined 21st-Century Abe.

To find out about our current projects, check out www.Rosenbach.org.

Blog

The 21st-Century Abe blog is the place to find out what’s been happening on 21stcenturyabe.org and what fun, exciting or downright ridiculous things the curatorial team have discovered in their search for Lincoln.

The blog is no longer being updated. But please check out our older posts.

Our Funders

This project has been funded by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Heritage Philadelphia Program with additional support from the Marketing Innovation Program. Additional support has come from the Samuel S. Fels Fund and The Raab Collection.

Presented By Rosenbach Museum and Library

The Undead Lincoln

By: Kathy Haas
June 29, 2009

Before starting this project I wasn’t aware that there was any connection between Abraham Lincoln and blood-drinking undead vampires, except insofar as the Rosenbach Museum & Library owns both Lincoln documents and Bram Stoker’s working notes for Dracula. However since we launched this project back in February, four people have submitted Vampire/Lincoln stories to the Found Abe section of the site, so I thought I’d do a little recap…

This submission links to an article about Bram Stoker’s admiration for Abraham Lincoln.

These two submissions both link to the same article about an upcoming book  about Lincoln as a vampire hunter (by the author of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”–a remixed version of Jane Austen’s classic novel)

And just in this weekend was this submission about an indie horror film called “The Transient”, whcih features Lincoln as an actual vampire.  As the info site explains: “Vampire Abraham Lincoln is really the most dignified, noble, and well-spoken character in the entire film. It just s happens he’s also a bloodsucking fiend. The only possible commentary we are making about Lincoln is that his iconic omnipresent “rock star” status in American popular culture has opened him up to a wider range of interpretation.” I’m embedding a pretty funny trailer for the film for your viewing pleasure.

comments 1

Bookmark and Share

Comments (1)

  1. Brandon Samuels 1:35 pm

    Hello Kathy,

    My name is Brandon Samuels and I really like you blog. Some of the posts and links you have here are really interesting, so I thought that you might want to know about a new website, timelines.com. Our idea is to create an interactive historical record of anything and everything, based on specific events that combine to form timelines. We’re trying to achieve a sort of user-created multimedia history, in which no event is too big or too small to record. Feel free to create events using excerpts and/or links from your blog. You will generate traffic and awareness of your blog, and you will be contributing to the recording of history.

    Check out these timelines: this one is an american civil war timeline. http://timelines.com/topics/american-civil-war/page/1; and this one is one about Abraham Lincoln: http://timelines.com/topics/abraham-lincoln.

    Give us a try and let me know your thoughts.

    Thanks,
    Brandon Samuels

Rosenbach Museum & Library
2008-2010 Delancy Place · Philadelphia, PA 19103
215.732.1600 · abe@rosenbach.org