Previous attempts to locate and publish Lincoln documents include Nicolay and Hay's 1905 Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, consisting of 12 volumes; Gilbert A. Tracy and Francis H. Allen’s 1917 Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln; Rufus Rockwell Wilson’s 1947 Uncollected Works of Abraham Lincoln: His Letters, Addresses and Other Papers; and Paul Angle's 1930 New Letters and Papers of Lincoln.
In the 1930s, the Abraham Lincoln Association began collecting photostats of Lincoln documents and by 1945 began drafting plans that eventually culminated in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap. It was published in 8 volumes (plus an index) between 1953 and 1955, with two supplemental volumes published in 1974 and 1990.
Basler’s Collected Works has become a standard resource for Lincoln and Civil War scholarship, but it suffers from limitations and omissions. Collected Works did not include incoming correspondence to Lincoln, which denies the reader important context. New technology and the development of documentary editing as a discipline allows for more faithful renditions of the texts. And in the nearly 60 years since the publication of Collected Works, many new Lincoln documents have been discovered, providing new opportunities for historical scholarship.With these reasons likely in mind, Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald assessed, "Though Roy Basler and his associates did an excellent job of editing Lincoln's writings a generation ago, I believe that it is time for a new, complete, updated edition of his works."
Explanation:
