[1] The ALA's founders included United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller, financier John Whitfield Bunn, United States Federal Judge J. Otis Humphrey, Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon, Illinois Governor Charles S. Deneen, Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson, and Illinois Senator Shelby Cullom.

In early 1995, several acclaimed historians—including Harold Holzer and then-ALA president Frank J. Williams—left the ALA board of directors and formed their own scholarly group, the Lincoln Forum, following "policy disagreements, alleged conflicts of interest, strong personalities and claims from out-of-town historians that they had been refused access to Lincoln materials.

The ALA's crowning publication is The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dunlap.

[7] Basler's Collected Works has become a standard resource for Lincoln and Civil War scholarship, but it suffers from limitations and omissions.

On February 12, 2009, President Barack Obama attended the ALA celebration as the guest of honor, giving a speech titled "What the People Need Done".

The Hay-Nicolas Dissertation Prize recognizes and encourages young scholars who conduct research on Abraham Lincoln and his times.