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Rod Davis and Doug WilsonLincoln Studies Center Plans Series of Books on Lincoln
The following is a news release from Knox College received on July 16, 2004:The Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, has signed an agreement with the University of Illinois Press to sponsor a series of books that will include the first-ever critical edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and a new edition of one of the most important biographies of Abraham Lincoln.
According to Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson, co-directors of the Lincoln Studies Center, the new series will include at least five books during the next five years, leading up to the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 2008 and the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009.
"More has been written about Lincoln than any other figure in American history, and many people think there isn't anything new to be discovered," said Wilson. "But if you look at the footnotes in books that are coming out now, you can see that the work that the Lincoln Studies Center has done since 1997 is already having an impact in the field."
"The Knox College Lincoln Studies Center Publication Series will bring to scholars and the general public Lincoln materials that, up until now, have not been available in reliable or readily accessible forms," said Davis.
Those materials will include the first-ever critical edition of the texts of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. At present, the only texts are transcripts, often contradictory, printed in newspapers whose editors were partisan backers of Republican Lincoln or Democrat Stephen Douglas, who were running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
"This is one of the most important political discourses in American history, and the nation has never had an authoritative edition of what was spoken by Lincoln and Douglas," Wilson said. "We plan to sort through all the texts of the seven debates, conduct a detailed study of the campaign, and produce an annotated edition of the debates that will be useful for scholars and intelligible to today's students and general readers."
The critical edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is planned for completion by 2008, the sesquicentennial of the debates, one of which occurred on the Knox campus, just outside the building, Old Main, that houses the Lincoln Studies office.
Also working on the project as a student research assistant is Andrew Christen, a Knox junior from Overton, Nebraska. Other students may be hired as the project continues, Davis said.
The first book in the series, expected by 2005, will be Davis and Wilson's edition of "Herndon's Lincoln," a biography of Lincoln written in 1889 by Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon.
"While newer biographies are more accurate and more complete, 'Herndon's Lincoln' is unique and irreplaceable, thanks to the author's unmatched access to Lincoln and his extensive contacts with Lincoln's acquaintances," Davis said.
"Our edition will include material that was censored from the original edition after Herndon's death and until now has never been fully restored," Wilson said.
Other books scheduled in the new series are a new edition of the diary of Lincoln's secretary of the navy Gideon Welles, and a new edition of the diary of Horatio Taft, a government official who had close ties to Lincoln's family.
The Welles diary was edited by the late William Gienapp, who died last October. Gienapp taught at Harvard University and was a member of the Lincoln Studies Center Board of Advisors. "Professor Gienapp was the first to propose that the Lincoln Studies Center undertake this series, and we are dedicating the series to him," Wilson said.
The Taft diary will be edited by another member of the Lincoln Studies Center Board, John Sellers, an American History specialist at the Library of Congress.
From 1999 through 2002, Davis and Wilson led a team of researchers that transcribed and annotated thousands of manuscripts in the Lincoln Collection at the Library of Congress. While the 140-year-old documents had been microfilmed, and images were available on the Internet, the Lincoln Studies Center transcriptions allowed historians, for the first time, to search for specific words within the documents.
Wilson and Davis earlier completed a widely acclaimed book "Herndon's Informants," a compilation of materials collected by Herndon from people who had known Lincoln. The New York Review of Books called it "a monumental achievement of scholarship... this material forms the basis for most of what we know about the first half of Lincoln's life." Their research also has been featured on the History Channel.
Wilson, who also is a noted scholar of Thomas Jefferson, taught English at Knox from 1961 to 1997. Davis taught history at Knox from 1963 to 1997. In addition to their research at the Lincoln Studies Center, which they founded in 1997, they have continued to teach occasional courses at Knox, including "Jefferson and Lincoln."
Davis recently published a new edition of a Lincoln biography by Ward Lamon, one of Lincoln's personal secretaries.
Wilson's most recent book, "Honor's Voice," which examined Lincoln's pre-presidential years in Illinois, won the prestigious Lincoln Prize; the Achievement Award of the Lincoln Group of New York; and the Barondess/Lincoln Award of the New York Civil War Roundtable; and was a New York Times "Notable Book."
Founded in 1837, Knox is a national liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, with students from 46 states and 50 nations. Knox's 'Old Main' is a National Historic Landmark and the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.
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