Ever since Maurice Halbwachs’s pioneering work, most scholars have been content to explore collective memory through texts and commemorative symbolism. Assuming that a study of collective memory has fuller meaning when it takes into account what ordinary people think about the past, we compare historians’ and commemorative agents’ representations of Abraham Lincoln to what four national samples of Americans believe about him. Five primary images—Savior of the Union, Great Emancipator, Man of the People, First (Frontier) American, and Self-Made Man—are prominent in the cumulative body of Lincoln representations, but recent surveys show that only one of these images, the Great Emancipator, is dominant within the public. Lincoln’s one-dimensional Emancipator image, which differs from the multi–dimensional one evident in a 1945 sample, reflects new perceptions of the Civil War shaped by late twentieth–century minority rights movements. Thus, “bringing men [and women] back in” involves survey evidence being added to historiographic and commemoration analysis to clarify one of sociology’s most ambiguous concepts, collective memory, and to explore its social and generational roots
Lincoln believed that American democracy meant equal rights and equality of opportunity. But he drew a line between basic natural rights such as freedom from slavery and political and civil rights like voting. He believed it was up to the states to decide who should exercise these rights.
Federal courts are those that hear cases involving matters of federal or US constitutional law; State courts are those that hear cases involving matters of state statutes and state constitutional law.
