Which Inference can the reader make about the continuing public fascination for President Lincoln?
ОА. Lincoln embodies a heroic example of a common man" of the people.
OB. Lincoln's complexities lead him to be re-interpreted by each generation.
Ос.
Lincoln's reputation overshadows his human characteristics and frailties.
OD. Lincoln serves as a model for US Presidents' role as Commander in Chief
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adapted from Lincoln the Great
by Wilfred W. McClay
The lure of the Civil War is that it taps into something far deeper, a
vein of powerful meanings and buried feelings that run beneath the
surface of everyday American life. There is a feeling of instinctive
reverence that extends to the sixteenth president himself. For
when it comes to the Civil War, and the leader who successfully
prosecuted it, we somehow feel ourselves drawing close to the very
core of American national identity. That is why these subjects
command our attention.
With Lincoln himself, the picture is particularly complex. Partly that
is because popular perceptions of him are as exalted and outsized
as the gigantic marble likeness of him inside the Lincoln Memorial,
that national temple of the American civil faith. Such images of
Lincoln as demigod do not jibe easily with the more human Lincoln
that we think we know-awkward, melancholic, compulsively
joke-telling, conniving, unhappily married, vulgar, fiercely
ambitious, and superlatively eloquent uncommon-common man. In
fact, as historian Merrill Peterson has shown, there have been
many Lincolns over the years, some of them archetypal--the Savior
of the Union, the Great Emancipator, the Man of the People, the
Self-Made Man--but others very much tied to their moment.
1 arising from natural impulses