EDITOR’S NOTE Recovering History

The Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa tells the story of happening on a paperback volume of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in a Fourth Avenue bookstore in Manhattan over half a century ago. Other than that serendipitous discovery, he could find little scholarship on Abraham Lincoln’s great contest of words and ideas with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas. And what historiographical notice the debates had garnered was almost entirely dismissive.

Today, the debates are well-remembered and their importance undoubted. One, of course, has to scour the record to discover any aspect of Lincoln’s life that has not been turned into a book, and yet our enthusiasm also has its discerning side. We’re more ready these days to credit the moral vision of a great individual like the sixteenth president, and this must be counted as a beneficent development in the evolution of our historical memory.

One person who exemplifies this corrective tendency is Lewis E. Lehrman, another nonprofessional doing his part to strengthen the historical record of America’s great narrative. Lehrman is the copilot steering the Gilder Lehrman Collection and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, whose aim has been to restore key documents and artifacts of American history to public notice. He is also the author of a book tracing the origins of Lincoln’s arguments against slavery in his famous 1858 debates with Douglas to the future president’s 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois. There, Lincoln challenged the legality and morality of Senator Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the new territories to choose whether to permit slavery.

Recovering history’s lost ground is also a theme of “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” which novelist and museophile Mary Kay Zuravleff covers in this issue. After opening this summer at the National Gallery of Art, the Afghanistan show will be moving to San Francisco this fall, before heading to Houston and New York City.

The semi-forgotten, though also legendary, 1929 “indy” film (if I may borrow an anachronism) People on Sunday is the subject of an endearing historical essay on page 42. This German movie launched a whole raft of cinematic careers that would later change Hollywood, as New York Sun movie critic Bruce Bennett explains.

“Historians are not very good dramatists,” says Richard Rabinowitz, the exhibit developer profiled in this issue. Fortunately they do not have to be, as the theater of the words and things people leave behind often speak eloquently for themselves, so long as we preserve them.