This week, I wanted to let all my readers know about an amazing historic find that has just come to my attention: “The Blog Cabin,” a Web-log kept by President Abraham Lincoln during the latter days of his presidency. Read it and be amazed at the depth of information now available to us about our 16th president, written in his own words and posted to his own Blogger account! (Entries are in reverse chronological order, of course, so start at the bottom and work your way up.)
A few weeks ago, my friend Smacky posted a couple blog entries that he'd just written that were alleged to have been written in 1990. They had lines in them that were ironic or funny because of the way events unfolded thereafter -- which of course he knew, which of course is why he wrote them.
Anyway, it gave me the idea for blogs written by historical figures.I had recently read Time magazine's special issue about him, so that's probably why Lincoln popped into my head before, say, George Washington. Desiring to keep things historically accurate (to a point), I perused many Civil War- and Lincoln-related Web sites for timelines, biographies and such, and I think the details are mostly reliable (except where they are obviously false for humorous purposes). I mention this solely to toot my own horn for doing research.
I could have just posted the text of the entries here, but I figured it would be much funnier if they were housed in an actual blog with all the trimmings. Which makes this a first for "Snide Remarks": Where certain previous columns have been in the format of something else (movie scripts, comments left on The Daily Herald's Web site, radio talk shows, etc.), this is the first one to use the bells and whistles of the Internet to make it actually LOOK like the thing it's parodying, not just sound like it.
