Teaching Abraham Lincoln

The Abraham Lincoln Association has a handful of plain text lesson plans that revolve around Lincoln documents. There's probably better stuff out there on Lincoln, but these are good for boiling down part of the large volume of Lincoln's works and there are a few good suggestions for classroom activities. Several Obama tie-ins from the ALA-hosted Lincoln birthday bicentennial as well. 

Nothern Illinois University's Lincoln/Net has an interesting audio library of songs from the civil war era and some interactive maps that show voting results for presidential elections of the period. Their Teacher's Parlor hosts several lesson plans:

1. Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858

2. Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858: Interactive Map Activity

3. The Anti-Slavery Movement

4. The Black Hawk War--Reconstructing "Stillman's Run"

5. The Cherokee Removal

6. Lincoln, Patriotism and Protest

7. Songs of the Times: American Concerns in 19th Century Campaigns

8. Slavery and the Legal Status of Free Blacks: Rhetorical Analysis of Debates During the 1847 Illinois Constitutional Convention

9. Free Market Labor vs. Slave Labor: Debating the Mud-Sill Theory

10. To Come to Illinois — Or Not?

11. Was the Dred Scott Decision Judicial Activism? The Theoretical Foundations of Legal Reasoning

12. Diplomatic Misunderstandings: Indian Treaties and the Black Hawk War

13. Parties and Their Politics: Analyzing Political Party Platforms, 1840-1860

14. The Importance of Religion in Political Life in the 19th Century: Abraham Lincoln's Experience

15. Gender Roles in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: What Fiction Tells Us

House Divided - The Ultimate U.S. Civil War Resource

Dickinson College's House Divided website endeavors to be the most complete digital archive of the U.S. Civil War. They've got it all. Entering the site will automatically give you data for the events of exactly 150 years ago - events, documents, letters, even birthdays of prominent (and not-so-prominent) people, most with informative biographies and great images. The 150th anniversary of the war is coming up, so needless to say this tool will be invaluable in U.S. History classrooms.

All of the  data is fully searchable, of course. They have a blog (RSS feed) that currently has a cool post about teaching Abraham Lincoln. Also on the site they feature several teacher resources, including:

• a digital classroom for teaching about the underground railroad 
• several virtual field trips, some of which are under construction
  
• a video library featuring interviews with historians on emancipation, the Dred Scott case, the underground railroad, and more
• a digital library of a handful of first-hand slave narratives