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Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
October 2011
On Sale: October 16, 2011
220 pages ISBN: 1442209542 EAN: 9781442209541 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From Lincoln-themed cocktails and waffle-parlors to high-tech museums and steamy romance novels, the image of Abraham Lincoln so permeates the national imagination that we now find him in the unlikeliest of places. In Lincoln, Inc., Jackie Hogan examines the uses (and abuses) of the sixteenth president in the United States today. The book takes readers on a journey through the little white lies of Lincoln tourism, and offers a front-row seat as the martyr president is invoked in heated political debates over such issues as homosexuality, abortion, and the βwar on terror.β Readers enter classrooms that use an idealized Honest Abe to βLincolnizeβ American schoolchildren. And readers step into the alternate universe of Lincoln fiction that transforms the Rail Splitter, by turns, into a hapless time-traveler, a sentimental cyborg, an axe-wielding zombie slayer, or a frontier heart-throb. But Lincoln, Inc. is more than a tour through the thriving βLincoln industryβ today. Whether in staid biographies, blockbuster films, school pageants, or sleeping pill advertisements, Hogan shows how the use of the Lincoln image reveals the nationβs shared fears and fascinations. The book analyzes the ways we employ Lincoln today in our political, ideological, personal, and national struggles; the ways we simultaneously deify and commercially exploit him; the ways he is packaged and sold in the marketplace of American ideas. In learning about βLincoln, Inc.,β we learn about ourselves, about who we think we are, and who we wish we could be.
 Media BuzzMarketplace - PRI - June 7, 2012
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