by
Steve V.
Member since:
December 17, 2006
History in the Summertime
August 14, 2007 06:15 PM EDT
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rating: 10/10
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comments: 6
I love meeting people who are passionate about their work. This summer I had the opportunity to talk to several historians and to hear them discuss their work. Harold Holtzer is a Lincoln scholar, who has written a number of books about our sixteenth president. He is also a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Holtzer wrote a book about Lincoln several years ago that analyzes the progression of Lincoln as a public man by examining the photographs that he had taken of himself and his family over the years, which is called The Lincoln Family Album. I had seen Holtzer on C-SPAN several times in the past, and I was excited when he sat down next to me in the second row of a small auditorium in Southern Indiana where I was attending a symposium on Lincoln with other Lincoln enthusiasts. I said hello and introduced myself and we chatted briefly. I had read in one of his articles that people who saw Lincoln for the first time were always struck by how ugly he was, but after he spoke for few moments they were so taken with the power of his words that they soon overlooked his homely appearance. I asked if he was really seen as that ugly, and Holtzer laughed and said that Lincoln’s appearance was strikingly different than the average man, and that modern viewers had simply grown accustomed to the face so that it was not that unusual to us. Historians also note the unusual sound of Lincoln’s voice, and I asked Holtzer if he thought that Sam Waterston’s interpretation of Lincoln’s voice and speech patterns was accurate. He laughed and said that he was probably biased because Waterston was a good friend of his, but that he thought it was probably very close. We had to stop chatting because the director of the symposium was beginning to introduce Mr. Holtzer.
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Comments: 6
I think that an intelligent , compassionate man with a "twinkle" in his eye
can be a devastatingly sexy combination and from what I have read
President Lincoln had all these fine qualities.