Free Republic

Over the last few months, celebrations for Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday have drawn attention to the Kentucky native's life and his legacy as president. But the 200-year anniversary of another Kentucky president's birth, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is receiving mixed reviews. "I'll say it this way - winners write history," said Ron Bryant, a Lexington historian writing a book on Davis. "We need heroes, we need villains. Lincoln became a hero and Davis a villain." Davis was born in what is now Todd County, Ky., in 1808, one year before Lincoln. Davis served as the only president of the 11...

WASHINGTON - Heading toward the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birthday, President Bush on Sunday celebrated the nation's 16th president as a man of steadfast convictions and honorable ideals. "It's fitting that we honor Abe Lincoln," Bush said in the ornate East Room of the White House. "Of all the successors to George Washington, none had a bigger impact on the presidency and the country." Bush spoke in early tribute to the 199th anniversary of Lincoln's birthday. Lincoln was born Feb 12, 1809. On Tuesday, first lady Laura Bush will speak at Lincoln's birthplace of Hodgenville, Ky., as part of the...

CHICAGO - Artists, sculptors and photographers knew Abraham Lincoln's face had a good side. Now it's confirmed by science. Laser scans of two life masks, made from plaster casts of Lincoln's face, reveal the 16th president's unusual degree of facial asymmetry, according to a new study. The left side of Lincoln's face was much smaller than the right, an aberration called cranial facial microsomia. The defect joins a long list of ailments — including smallpox, heart illness and depression — that modern doctors have diagnosed in Lincoln. Read MORE.

I just read an interesting if flawed book, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. Some fascinating tidbits in it. For example, Morse didn't invent much in the way of telegraph hardware, which is attributable to others. What he did do was software - and the entrepreneurship. Prior experimenters had used clunky codes for encoding messages; Morse used the count of each letter which was in a printer's array of type to tell him which letters to make the easiest to encode. Thus, "e," the most-used letter, is encoded...