Learning about America by Learning about Lincoln

Studying Abraham Lincoln offers a window onto America for international students says David Shawn whose summer course, Lincoln and His Legacy, has drawn students from around the globe.

Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of articles about visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU. 

Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…

Marios Kleanthous (CAS’15) reads the Gettysburg Address slowly, his Greek-accented voice enunciating every syllable in this iconic American speech. Even in the claustrophobic confines of the small, windowless classroom—senior lecturer David Shawn must jury-rig a desk out of two student seats to hold his papers, books, and coffee—Abraham Lincoln’s spare 271 words, in Kleanthous’ carefully precise pronunciation, retain their thought-provoking power, as Shawn leads his dozen, mostly international, students through a line-by-line dissection.

Lincoln gave the address in 1863. Doing the math for students in his Lincoln and His Legacy class, Shawn (GRS’98) points out that “four score and seven years” traced the nation’s founding to 1776, and its founding proposition to the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” As for the contradiction of that assertion in a nation with slavery, Lincoln declared that with victory in the Civil War, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”

Native Venezuelan Daniel Posada (ENG’17) compares Lincoln’s forecast to his prepresidential “House Divided” speech, which predicted that slavery would sunder the Union. At Gettysburg, Posada argues, “he’s saying, let’s start over with this new house, let’s finish the house.…It’s brilliant.”

Other students eagerly join the discussion, showing that in this commemorative year (April marked the 150th anniversary of both the war’s end and Lincoln’s assassination), the man many consider America’s greatest president still animates students, foreigners in particular. Shawn invites some of his charges to tell a visitor the diverse lands they hail from. Dubai, Kenya, and Kuwait come the answers, along with one “I’m from New Jersey.” (Students from China, Taiwan, and Korea are also enrolled in the course.)

Coordinator of the CAS Writing Center, Shawn says many international students take summer classes, but the 16th president has special appeal: “As one student put it to me the other day, ‘Knowing Lincoln means knowing something about America as well.’” That is nowhere more true than at Gettysburg, where Lincoln encapsulated his take on the country’s history in just three paragraphs. Before this class, the man and that history were ciphers to Cendrella Zahra (CAS’16), who during school in her native Dubai hadn’t learned about either.

“When we first took the class, I got all the years wrong. I thought he was in the 1700s,” she says during a class break. Zahra also had been unaware that slavery persisted for the better part of a century after this country’s founding. “I learned so much in this class about US history…how strong of a president he was, even though there was a civil war and his country was very divided.

“After taking this class, I really want to go see the Lincoln Memorial, and maybe even go to Gettysburg,” she says.

Shawn teaches not just Lincoln’s life and era but the words of this arguably most literary of presidents, and that has given Posada fresh insight. “Reading over and over again the Gettysburg Address, his inaugural speeches,” he says, “I just can admire him more and more as a writer.” Posada is considering becoming a lawyer, Lincoln’s profession. “Certainly,” he says, “studying him is driving me every day more to try and do it.”

The main aim for students in this writing class is to study Lincoln’s words in order to hone their own work. In pursuit of that goal, Shawn highlights Lincoln’s astute targeting of his message to different audiences. He notes that before Gettysburg, Lincoln told one abolitionist correspondent that his sole goal was preserving the Union, slavery or no slavery. Yet he wrote that letter having already settled on his Emancipation Proclamation, which would declare that slaves in Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

In short, he was a politician, charting winding means to an overall end. If that doesn’t square with Lincoln’s great-man image, it may be why another session of the class discusses a visual metaphor, the one Zahra longs to see: the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital.

The massive statue of the Railsplitter and the memorial’s temple-like appearance are majestic. But students who’ve seen it, Shawn says, find that “there’s still a quiet inside…a kind of respectful—not silence necessarily, but almost an awe. But that awe is interesting, because you can feel a connection still to that Lincoln who’s there. If you look at that stature, he’s very human looking.…He doesn’t look godlike in the same way that some Roman statues will portray their gods. He is approachable.”

Approachable enough that one former student gifted Shawn with sweat socks bearing a top-hatted, frock-coated likeness of the president. That he is remembered both in marbled grandeur and a pair of socks underscores what Shawn sees as a key lesson of the course: “The legacy of Lincoln is really determined by us.”

Lincoln and His Legacy will be offered this fall. Find details about the Writing Program schedule here.

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