Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks – one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, were innocent or simple, but on a second look they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more.
Thanks to generous donations from our supporters, we created “Q & Abe” – a podcast that investigates real questions from visitors to the Cottage. Come on down the rabbit hole with us as we seek the answers – we always start with Lincoln and the Cottage, but we often end up in unexpected places.
For this episode, we’re addressing a question from a teenage student curious about how seriously we take ourselves. Along the way we talk about what vampire archetypes can mean for society, history on film, and how to think about whether something is “real” or not. Come along with us!
In addition to the embedded media player below, you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts / Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You also can read below for a transcript of the episode.
Joan Cummins: Hello and welcome to season 7! I’m very excited to be able invite you to join us for Q&Abe Live on March 12, 2025. President Lincoln’s Cottage is hosting this virtual event as a special edition episode.
Callie Hawkins: We’ll be answering a brand new question and hearing, as always, from a variety of fascinating experts. Plus, we want to hear what questions you might have. Visit us at lincolncottage.org to get tickets. We hope to see you there!
JC: Here’s today’s episode: Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. Visitors, young and old alike, connect with us from next door and from around the globe.
CH: And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks, one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, seem innocent or simple, but on a second look, they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more. Each episode, we’ll investigate a single real question a visitor asked us here.
JC: At President Lincoln’s Cottage, we’re storytellers, historians, and truth seekers, so we called on people whose expertise could speak to all the facets of these questions.
CH: I’m Callie Hawkins
JC: And I’m Joan Cummins
JC: This is Q&Abe. Come on down the rabbit hole with us
CH: Let’s take that half hour now. For this episode, we’re addressing the question: “Have you seen Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?”
JC: A teenage student asked me this question during our tour, I think by way of feeling out whether we take ourselves too seriously or not. The movie, released in 2012, is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. The author developed his book into the movie script in collaboration with the film’s director, Timur Bekmambetov.
CH: In case you happen to be unfamiliar with this film, it purports to be a biography of Lincoln and uses events from his real life, but adds action-packed vampire hunting in strategic places. For example, in the movie Abraham’s mother Nancy Lincoln is killed by vampires when he is only a young boy, leading to his lifelong crusade against them – when in reality her death was caused by milk contaminated with snakeroot.
JC: Grahame-Smith says he was inspired by seeing a surge of Lincoln work in conjunction with the president’s 200th birthday and an explosion of vampire content at the same time. What if two great things could be better together, he says? He and Bekmambetov have both described it as a superhero story and talked about their admiration for Lincoln.
CH: So, does a movie like this count as learning about history? We spoke to Andrew Salvati, who teaches in the media and communications department at Drury University, for more context.
Andrew Salvati: I think it depends. I think, uh, that for most people, watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire or Spielberg’s Lincoln, they come away with a sense of general themes, uh, like the moral evil of slavery or, in Spielberg’s Lincoln, the difficulties that Lincoln had in passing the 13th Amendment, and they won’t necessarily remember all the dates and all the historical details. I think if you already come into it with, uh, an understanding of the Lincoln story, maybe you get a little bit more. You get those, those little details you say, aha, yeah, I know what’s going on there, right?
CH: I also tend to see them, too, as catalysts for curiosity. And, you know, I think that, that year that those movies came out, it was an anniversary year for the Lincolns and everything, but we did—there were more people visiting the Cottage, with interesting questions. And, you know, certainly I know they didn’t come here to find out if he was actually a vampire hunter, but I think it sparked a, a level of curiosity for people and I think honestly, for museums, that’s why we’re here.
AS: Yeah, I think that’s right. Um, I’ve done some work on this relating to the way in which video games about World War II, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, that sort of thing, are, as you say, catalysts for learning more. And I found empirical evidence of this online, people writing blogs about how, you know, this stage of the game or this character in the game prompted them to do a little bit more of their own research. Um, so yeah, I could certainly see something like that for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter too.
JC: We also talked with Scott Magelssen, a performance studies scholar at the University of Washington, who’s worked on the intersection of history and performance. We asked him: how would you approach something like this movie, where there’s such a big gap between what actually happened and what the movie shows?
CH: Some of what he said aligned with Andrew’s point of view.
Scott Magelssen: I think it’s safe to say that most people who go to see Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, are not going in worried whether they’re going to get misinformation about Abraham Lincoln, about the past, about Civil War, about the 19th century. People go in and are ready to enjoy this thing because they know that it’s going to be playing with the past. And, if people already know a little bit about Abraham Lincoln, they can look forward to seeing the way the movie, reminds them of what they already know and then kind of plays with it a little bit. So the, the fun and enjoyment is, is, is catching the, the differences between what we know about the past, and, and, and what the filmmakers are doing with it. The other thing I’d say, you know, we talked about, I talked, I mentioned like, you know, what feels emotionally authentic. I think that, for some viewers, they, they find everything they need about the past in books and in, uh, museums. But, you know, there’s something about a Hollywood movie, other kinds of performances, that can deliver that kind of emotional truth, emotional authenticity, even if it doesn’t have to do with accuracy. So, so what, what a great way to, to feel good about the past, even while you’re holding in your head the idea that this is, this didn’t really happen.
CH: This really clicked for me because I recently saw Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! on Broadway, which also is fun precisely because you know it’s not “accurate” historical material. Both Vampire Hunter and Oh Mary possess for me the type of emotional authenticity that I found lacking in so many other portrayals of Lincoln and his family.
JC: Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the movie, says he hopes it inspires people “to investigate further,” which aligns with what Callie said about being a catalyst for curiosity. However, Grahame-Smith has also said that the last thing he wants is to make Lincoln look bad, which means the movie presents Lincoln as a great hero without much further complexity. I can see how some folks would find that un-serious.
CH: If a movie is about a historical subject, why would people feel like it “doesn’t count?” Why would people feel like movies aren’t history?
SM: There’s an assumption sometimes that performance is what’s not real. Performance is what you put on, performance is what you’re trying to trick people with. The word “performative” has become really popular in usage recently. Like, like “performative” means when you’re doing something that’s not authentic, that you’re, you’re being fake. But performance studies people say, no, no, no, wait a minute. Like performance is actually, like, our selves are actually, you know, all performance, we, we choose to convey ourselves to other people through performance, it’s all, it’s all we’ve got, you know. And you do perform different selves on, you know, different occasions. And sometimes that’s sincere and sometimes that is insincere, but, just because it’s performance doesn’t make it more or less, uh, fake. That’s a, that’s a longstanding fear and anxiety, that performance is not authentic, and there’s been a, a long tradition of anti-theatricality, people being distrustful of anything performance-related, you know, especially when it comes to history and the past and what people regard as true. For some people, performance can get in the way of that. Performance can water it down with, with emotionality and, you know, make it more fun with, with make-believe and pretend. And other people, another big group of people think of performance as a way to get closer to something more authentic, to talk about the past in a way that feels emotionally true and cognitively true. Especially if, if a performer is really, really good at it, and, and really rigorous and, and has studied the past, like that, that we sometimes can trust these people to get us a little bit closer to what really happened in a kind of special magical, performance kind of way.
CH: Scott, you can’t see this. But it says “performance authenticity:” one of the things that I just scribbled down, that I wanted to talk about. You know, I have been an interpreter for a long time. I wore a costume at the beginning of my career, um, when I worked down at Jamestown, in Williamsburg, Virginia. I think it was the probably the greatest lesson to me, and this was really early in my career, like first job, but it really caused me to think very deeply about the difference between real and authenticity. And those are, you know, I think in the context of this work, those are very different things. It, it was not uncommon for somebody, a visitor, to say, “is that real fire?” or, “is that real water?” or, you know, as we were sitting on a ship on a river. And that is not authenticity. I’m not quite sure how to articulate the, what, like, the difference here, but, but I’d, I’d always only ever thought of those two things as being the same. And they’re really not.
JC: Yeah. And I think part of what you’re—I think you mentioned this in the beginning, but it’s like, the reason people are worried about performance is that they’re worried they’re being lied to somehow, right? That, that the information they’re getting or the impression that they’re getting is somehow fake.
SM: Yeah, I wonder if some of these anxieties about what’s real, I wonder if that’s a fairly new thing to be anxious about. It wasn’t until, things are, are mass produced and things are produced cheaply that—and it wasn’t even consumers right away that, that started wondering if this is real. It was the advertisers who started saying, this is authentic. This is the real thing. This is homemade. This is made with time honored traditions, right? Even if it was mass produced. You know, if, if Kool Aid has real sugar in it, people are going to be happier about it than if it is, some, something synthetic. And so we, as, as consumers were taught to be suspicious of anything, unless we could believe in it as real. So, yeah, again, it’s, it’s this desire for the real, desire for the authentic, desire for the true representation, but that will always hinge on our recognition that there’s a difference between reality and its representation, and we want to kind of, in a very complicated and complex way, we want to be able to keep all these things balanced in our head while we’re watching to give us that, that really enjoyable and successful experience.
CH: We know a fair amount about what Lincoln was reading, including Shakespeare, but would he have encountered any vampires? What was out there in the 19th century that Lincoln might have read or known about?
JC: Andrew told us about something called Varney the Vampire which came out around 1847. It’s subtitled “The Feast of Blood” and is the kind of high drama story any vampire lover could sink their teeth into. But, we were starting to realize that what we really needed was a vampire expert.
CH: We got in touch with Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, a professor at the University of Texas Austin with a specialty in the Gothic. She told us more about what was out there:
Elizabeth Richmond-Garza: If we talk about the origin of the vampire, the earliest reference to it actually is in the Epic of Gilgamesh. So it’s incredibly ancient. It’s incredibly global. If we’re thinking about the Seth Grahame novel, if we’re thinking about Bram Stoker, if we’re thinking about Frankenweenie, whatever [laughs] you know, contemporary Gothic, I think there are two principal points of origin and they come together at a certain point. One is the, mm, South Slavic, especially the Balkan mythologies. And this is a notion of a vampire as a folk belief, someone who’s died in a way that’s not proper. They’re not consecrated, they die in some, ex-extraordinary way, and there’s a concern that they’re going to come back from the dead because they haven’t gone to their eternal rest. And there’s a whole series of practices. So all the staking and the silver and all of those elaborate technologies of vampire slaying, was very important to the Seth Grahame novel – so that’s the folk material. The second is centered around, uh, particular historical individuals. Actual humans, um, that’s Elizabeth Bathory in Hungary and Vlad Tepes in Wallachia, Romania, Transylvania… Those are characters who falsely, or not falsely—there’s controversy around that—get accused of atrocious treatment of other human beings. Um, that’s where the impalement comes from, for example, that’s so connected to vampires. I’m not a Lincoln, uh, specialist, ha. What I would expect him to know as the kind of well-read person is certainly Byron’s The Vampyre. It was a red-hot bestseller. Everyone bought this. It went through editions and editions. It’s, it’s a novella. It’s not even a novella. It’s a short story. It’s a tiny little thing. Everybody read it.
JC: We also asked Elizabeth to say more about why vampires show up in stories. What kinds of circumstances lead to the kind of rush of vampire stories that the US saw in the early 2010s?
ERG: Whenever you see lots of vampires, I would like to suggest it means there’s a lot of social anxieties around, and you need a scapegoat for the things that are freaking you out and unnerving you. So whether it’s vampires or ghosts, and yes, it is about bringing back past crimes and past, uh, transgressions. So that could be a, very explicit political or historical critique. It’s also often going to be about, um, new categories of human identity and behavior about which people are uneasy. So the sort of huge explosion of vampire stories, um, especially in the fourth quarter of the 19th century, all over Europe, particularly in the UK, tracks with immigration from Ireland because of the potato famine, Jewish East Europeans fleeing the pogroms and moving to London. The likeliest, I would suggest, um, phenomenon that will trigger and invite the vampire as the archetype you go to, is concerns about ethnic and racial diversity, often in the form of immigration and xenophobia. And so that is the feature that I would think about in a post 9/11 context, more than a decade afterwards, it would be a reason why I might imagine, as we sit here in the beginning, middle of the 2020s, that we might find lots of vampires showing up. They represent a, a transgressive outsider who enables behaviors, um, among the regular community that are normally taboo, but is also fundamentally going to be able to be defeated in the end.
JC: This made a lot of sense to me because one of the things about vampires is that they’re human but not quite – they’re fundamentally different in some way, and I could see how that would map onto concerns about people who are different from you entering your life.
CH: Our team was also wondering: do we need to draw distinctions between vampires and then zombies, ghosts, ghouls, or other archetypes of things coming back from the dead?
ERG: One of the things I find fascinating, because I teach a course on contemporary Gothic, but I also teach a course on 19th century Gothic, is thinking about whether the archetypes are really just, you know, like different vantage points on the same phenomenon, or whether they’re actually fundamentally unique and distinct from each other. So if they’re really facets of the same phenomenon, then they’re rather solidly about the fear of death. [laughs] And so in a sense, every one of them is about, is death a closure? Is death a gateway to somewhere else? It’s the thing that we just don’t know about until we’ve actually been there and then we can’t tell anyone about it. So I think they’re all about the preoccupation with human mortality. That being said, I think each archetype is extremely importantly different. So, if one is looking at Twilight versus The Walking Dead, those are very, very different ways of thinking about what is death, thinking about what is a human being. But if you choose to write, um, a creative work, a fictional work, I think you are going to pick the archetype. Is it about, um, living beyond the grave and coming back with your full mentality and a terrible appetite? That would be a vampire. Does it have the possibility of being fundamentally attractive? Well, that could also be a vampire. Is it the nightmare of somehow still being in the world as a material moving thing with an insatiable appetite and no mind? Well then zombie might be the thing. And I probably think ghosts are one of the most variable because we have such different ways of thinking about what the afterlife is. So I think the exact archetype really does matter.
JC: Elizabeth could help us with our vampire questions because of her expertise in the Gothic. What is “the Gothic” anyway?
ERG: People often think of the Gothic as being, at best, frivolous, uh, at worst, self-indulgent. One of the reasons I work on the Gothic, teach it, write about the Gothic, is because, If I may say it this way, I take it kind of seriously. Most of us think of the Gothic based upon, well, a novel written by Horace Walpole, published in 1756, called The Castle of Otranto, where he channels his inner Shakespeare, creates all kinds of appalling behaviors on the parts of Italians, whom the English found very suspect in the period, and delights and appalls his audience. That created a fashion for the Gothic, leading to something like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. So, I would say the Gothic is a style, it’s very much part of aesthetics. It’s very strongly connected to melodrama, sort of music-enhanced, heightened emotions. One critic of the Gothic suggests that actually the experience of the Gothic is about having these intense, intense emotions, kind of cathartically, and then letting them dissipate, and returning to normality, that the experience of the Gothic actually helps you to cope with the ordinary and the everyday. And yes, there is the idea of evil, of something that is menacing, of a world that is fundamentally not benevolently disposed towards human beings.
CH: We know that the Cottage is an early example of a Gothic Revival building in the United States. I asked Elizabeth, how does the Gothic influence architecture?
ERG: You think Notre Dame Cathedral, you think the Houses of Parliament and Westminster, Queen Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben, et cetera. So Gothic is actually intentionally created as Neo-Gothic, as a style by the British government. And there’s a specific architect, his name is Pugin, who is tasked with creating a 19th century version of original medieval English Gothic, so as to make it the decor of the Victorian Empire. You know, before they kept copying the Parthenon or something from Rome, but there was this intentional decision to go with something local, and that Gothic style, which begins in the 1860s and 1870s with one particular architect in the sort of forefront of making it happen, is then something that starts being adopted and put in place, maybe it’s a kind of Anglophilia, all over the United States.
CH: I do think Americans have a different relationship with the far-away past than Europeans do. “A long time ago” has different a scale for us.
JC: I had another question for Elizabeth: what’s the deal with sexy vampires? How does that come into the picture? She said there was one crucial pivot:
ERG: And that is at the Villa Diodati, Byron, Mary Shelley, a group of people are hanging out during a particularly stormy summer because of a volcanic explosion. And George Gordon, Lord Byron, creates the sketch for The Vampyre with a Y. He creates the first attractive vampire. All the previous vampires were either predatory aristocrats and/or literally these gnawing dead, these parasitical entities that come back Nosferatu-style from the grave. Byron creates Lord Strongmore or Lord Ruthven. He gives two different names to the character. And this is the dandy. This is the seducer. This is this extraordinarily attractive creature on the way, certainly to someone like Edward from the Twilight series. Some, like Stoker, use both. So all kinds of really interesting things happen. But our sense of the elegant Bela Lugosi in his white tie is invented by Byron.
JC: The Old South is another area that people fantasize about, adding a veneer of glamor to the violence. In the case of the movie we’re discussing, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter uses the metaphor of slavery as vampirism. What kind of commentary might this be making?
CH: Elizabeth gave us a couple other examples of how vampires have been used to reflect on society.
ERG: I think the vampire is regularly used to make meta commentaries, to make social commentaries. One of the ones that it’s most regularly been used, uh, to look into is class inequities and economics. Famously Karl Marx describes capitalism as being a vampire. In terms of concrete use of the vampire, one of the things that troubles me is that it has regularly been used by artists to say rather progressive things, but the vampire story and the archetype itself at the same time confirms any number of prejudices. There are multiple cartoons that are out, um, obviously they’re suppressed at the moment, but they’ve been out over the last five or six years that represent Vladimir Putin as a vampire. Doesn’t hurt that his name is not Vlad, but it is Vladimir, so there’s a certain sort of euphoniousness about it. So if you start looking at political cartoons in particular, you’ll see the vampire showing up, and in the United States as well, constantly in terms of looking at unjustified authoritarian leadership and/or populations that are viewed as living parasitically off the collective. Uh, and it doesn’t always do good work. It can go either way.
JC: So, does this central metaphor hold up for this story?
AS: What it has done, if anything, I think, is to reveal the appropriateness or, you know, perhaps the inappropriateness, if you’re not a fan of the book or the, the movie, of the metaphor of slaveholding as a kind of vampirism. And it’s a metaphor that was actually used at the time, uh, in the 19th century by no less an abolitionist than William Lloyd Garrison, who in an 1829 speech called the institution, “the vampire, which is feeding upon our lifeblood.” So this image of slaveholding as vampirism was certainly circulating at the time. And that’s kind of what I tried to get at in my essay that I wrote a few years ago on, on the book, is that how do we as, as historians represent something like the institution of slavery, which is so horrifying and so enormous – how do we actually do that without just kind of falling back onto statistics, or kind of real vague generalities? And the argument that I made was, well, we may have some writings from former slaves, or former enslaved people, I should say, that document what the experience was like for them. We don’t have that for a lot of people who were enslaved. So, Seth Grahame-Smith kind of comes up with this way – I don’t, I don’t necessarily think he knew he was doing it – but by mapping Gothic codes onto, uh, the Lincoln story, onto the story of enslavement, uh, we kind of get a better sense of how horrifying and how gruesome it, it was.
JC: I do think part of the metaphor that makes sense is that it’s body-focused, emphasizing the exploitation of Black bodies that was a key element of chattel slavery. However, our colleague Jules pointed out that the metaphor also conflicts with ideas about blood from the time, where scientists and legislators placed great value on quantifying what percentage of a person’s blood was of African origin. If the Confederate vampires survive by drinking the blood of Black people, wouldn’t that make them Black by their own standards? You’d assume they would want to avoid that at all costs.
CH: What’s different between when the book or movie came out and now that might change how we think about its approach to slavery and history?
JC: For one thing, vampires were IN in the 2010s. True Blood was on TV, Twilight was huge. I remember seeing round the block lines to get into the movie. It became a big point of reference for what people meant when they thought about vampires.
CH: Seth Grahame-Smith explicitly referenced it: he is “proud to say my vampires don’t sparkle” – meaning, they’re real vampires, not girly romantic ones. Elizabeth says the Gothic has prompted this kind of reaction for a long time.
ERG: One of the things that’s delightful and paradoxical about the Gothic is, as it began to get rather successful and fashionable in the early 19th century, it was simultaneously accused of being frivolous and effeminate, and young women were not supposed to read the Gothic novels because they were too racy and too daring. On the one hand, no real person would actually bother with a Gothic novel. On the other hand, a young woman might be far too, um, excited by it for her own good. So again, I think Gothic novels do a lot of really important work, but they do have this tradition of being disparaged, and being disparaged means that they’re considered, as I say, simultaneously only to be read by girls, and also girls really shouldn’t read something like that.
JC: The other major difference between 2012 and now is how we approach the simplification of historical stories. Since then we’ve had many more conversations about the importance and the value of a complex narrative. I have a general sense that people who feel that we need to go back to whatever we were doing before, feel that that was better because it was simpler, easier to understand or predict. If I were going to make a movie about Lincoln today, even if it had vampires in it, I would want it to be about how complicated the story really is, and not about like, we got rid of the bad guys and then everything was fine.
CH: We’re always working to reveal the true, really complex Lincoln here at the Cottage. For example, in our teacher programming we ask folks to think carefully about enslavement as a choice that enslavers were making every day to exploit others.
ERG: I think there is a, a very important critique that could be made, um, more generally of the role of agency and accountability in the novel, again, for this original sin. Was it just going along with what was happening? And then, if we do want to read it kind of allegorically as being about slavery in the U. S., about how plantation culture came to be, about whether people chose or did not choose that, then I think the novel gets more and more complicated.
CH: Scott watched the movie with his kid, who agreed that its approach could have been more complex:
SM: The big question my kid had was, isn’t slavery bad enough? Isn’t, isn’t the sort of the Confederacy and the notion of what Lincoln was fighting against, doesn’t that make a good enough villain? Why do you have to additionally add vampires? It’s kind of like when you watch Indiana Jones, when you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you have the Nazis who are interested in the Ark of the Covenant as a way to help them win the war.
JC: That’s not the problem with the Nazis.
SM: That’s not the problem with the Nazis. The Nazis are still terrible and, and they are, and they are villains with or without that story. So I, I think this, this movie fits into that same kind of category, this, this same genre.
JC: Andrew also brought the Nazis up – they’re obliquely referenced in the book version of the story, when Grahame-Smith says there was another vampire uprising between 1939 and 1945.
AS: People who didn’t necessarily read the book thought that slavery was just a contrivance of the vampires. That it was something that the vampires did and that human beings didn’t have a role in it at all. I think you kind of get in the same problem there too with the Holocaust, being that the, the Holocaust was a contrivance of the vampires, that humans had no agency in it and humans weren’t responsible for it. So I think he kind of throws it out at the end there and doesn’t really elaborate on it at all, and that’s why I think it, it can be problematic. But, uh, for a close reader of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, vampires sort of attached themselves to the institution that already existed, that was brought over by Europeans and vampires kind of saw this as an opportunity. One can maybe assume that Seth Grahame-Smith meant the same thing, uh, when it came to Nazis and the Holocaust, but I think he, he needs to be careful there in a way that maybe he, he wasn’t.
JC: Yeah. And it’s interesting to think about like, oh, no human being could possibly be this evil. And you’re like, well, they were. So.
AS: Right, right.
CH: We might not have expected a conversation about vampire cinema to have much to do with how we do our work here at the Cottage, but in conversation with our guests it really started to change how we think about the work we do. Is there a difference between what we’re doing as historians and what people who make more popular media about it are doing?
AS: I don’t know how controversial a statement this is, but I’m kind of one to think that history itself is a medium. So I, I think historians are kind of media studies folks themselves because they’re involved in doing source criticism, right, which is something that that we do as media studies folks as well. It’s kind of like a general humanities, uh approach to the world and life as well, right? Um, doing source criticism and, and trying to be objective and, and reading texts and seeing how they interact with other texts.
JC: In our conversation about performance and authenticity, Scott also had some serious questions about a traditional historical approach.
SM: What’s also interesting to consider is whether, you know, what we’re finding with capital H historical research is, is also true and authentic. I mean, the people who are writing documents, the people who are, uh, recording things in their diary or writing letters, they are also subjective, emotionally driven people. And they have, uh, a very narrow perspective of reality and they don’t know everything, and they have feelings. And so is a letter that somebody writes to their spouse, is that reliable? Is that, is that true just because it was written in the hand of someone from the past? I would say, you know, it depends. I think that, I think that we have to treat these historical documents too as, complicated bits of information that can give us a, a picture but that we also can’t completely one hundred percent trust as, uh, what really happened.
ERG: So as a humanities cultural studies person, not as a historian, I say this with all humility, but I have thought of history as being about the undead, that it is an activity of bringing something back, but with a difference. You can’t time travel us back to 1863. So it’s some kind of revenant version of the past that involves a seance or a conjuration, again, the broad category of the undead, it involves imagining the stories of people for whom we will never have an archive, about whom we will never know anything – in particular, unlike someone like Abraham Lincoln, about whom one knows a very great deal. So I think sometimes it is a matter of bringing back the dead, but knowing that they’re not going to be the same as when they were alive. And I think it’s one of the things that’s exciting for me about the way history is done as someone who does cultural studies rather than say, very strictly archival historical work.
JC: Well, I for one am gonna have a lot of fun thinking about myself as a caretaker of the undead.
CH: One of my favorite parts about what we do at the Cottage is that we encourage people to connect with the story of this place through their emotions. It’s not uncommon for someone to be drawn to tears or to laugh out loud while on a tour. To me, it’s a deeper level of engagement with the place and with the story and it’s what sets our experiences apart. With this in mind, I really appreciate what Scott had to say:
SM: We think with our emotions, right? And so, a lot of the past, especially in the past couple hundred years, there’s been this conceit that if we can kind of, suppress our emotions, we can get closer to the historical truth because that’s more objective, that’s more cognitive and, and emotions are squishy. Emotions are, are unreliable, emotions can get in the way. So, you know, places like, like yours, that are more about, how do we get people thinking about what they would do if they were trying to figure out these same problems? Ways to get people thinking about their, their current values and beliefs now in the present as a way to help understand the past. So I like museum spaces where I am confronted with something surprising and I’m asked to think about it and then, you know, maybe even ask myself, what would I do in this situation? And then and then compare and contrast to what, what the person from the from the past did. And so when we are in the room in the museum or in the theater with a bunch of people who we imagine share some of those values and we are all feeling along with each other and we are all agreeing with what we share as, as valuable in this interpretation of the past, that’s the way that kind of shores up what makes us, us. What, helps affirm our identity, what helps, keep us plugging through life. What we believe in, what we fight for, what we, what we hope for the next generation. And so, that’s hard to do if you’re just focusing on the cognitive, right? You’re there for the, for the facts, but you’re also there for the, for the ideas, the beliefs and the values. And that’s something that’s, bolstered and strengthened when it is happening in community.
JC: We strive to create that kind of community at the Cottage – one that can help us explore and affirm our values and make a plan for the future. Thanks for being a part of it!
CH: We want to encourage you to think about: what from the past do you want to keep alive, and what do you commit to laying to its final rest? What’s out there that is preying on us, and what is keeping us human?
JC: This episode was produced by me, Joan Cummins, with Callie Hawkins, Haley Bryant, Jules Losee, and additional support from the President Lincoln’s Cottage team. Music for Q&Abe was written, performed, and is copyrighted by, Clancy Newman.
CH: Your support makes Q & Abe possible. If you enjoy coming along for the journey with us, please show your support by making a contribution at www.lincolncottage.org. Whether it is five dollars or five hundred, we couldn’t do it without you. You can also support us by hitting subscribe, by leaving a review, or by sharing with friends.
JC: To the kid who asked me this question, thanks for giving us a great reason to watch action movies at work.
CH: Comments? Questions? Write to us at [email protected].
JC: President Lincoln’s Cottage is a home for brave ideas. Stay curious!
