President Lincoln’s Shrines and Circuses: How Lincoln Commemoration Shaped the American Museum Movement

“President Lincoln’s Shrines and Circuses: How Lincoln Commemoration Shaped the American Museum Movement”

Presented by Thomas D. Mackie, Jr.

Sunday, February 24, 2019, at 2:00 p.m.

Meeting Rooms A- B, Allen County Public Library, Main Library

Americans’ memory of our 16th president dominates the over 70 museums, historic sites, archives, and libraries devoted to him. Scattered relics hoarded by groups of devoted Lincoln followers in the 19th and early 20th century created a pattern for his public memory and these museums’ collections, fashioning a merger between reverential shrines with circus sideshows or dime museums.  Lincoln museums are so extensive in number and diverse in form that they provide a sampling of the entire public museum movement in America.

Thomas Mackie is the former director of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. He currently teaches at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana.

Lincoln at the Library programs are is sponsored by the Friends of the Allen County Public Library.  They are free and open to the public.

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