The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

[1] Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most famous politicians and is consistently ranked as one of the greatest presidents ever to occupy the White House.

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

Images of more than 96,000 documents, arranged by case, were published in DVD-ROM format as The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition (University of Illinois Press, 2000).

Beginning in 2003, teams of researchers visited private and public repositories around the U.S. and in several foreign countries, searching for, identifying, and scanning thousands of documents.

The major purpose of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln is "to preserve all of Lincoln's correspondence (both incoming and outgoing) and speeches with digital images, to provide authoritative transcriptions of those documents, to offer historical context for each document through annotation, and to make the images and transcriptions freely available over the Internet.

The Digital Edition includes transcriptions and images of documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln, presented in a searchable format.

[14] The first online release of material included every known Lincoln document through 1842, when his career in the Illinois General Assembly ended.

The Center for State Policy and Leadership at the University of Illinois-Springfield was a long-time co-sponsor of the project with additional funding at various times coming from the National Endowment for the Humanities,[17] the National Historical Publications and Records Commission,[18] the Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.