Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln had been a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator, a member of the United States House of Representatives, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. Senate. As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year.

He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress before Lincoln’s death and was ratified by the states later in 1865. Lincoln closely supervised the victorious war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including Ulysses S. Grant. Historians have concluded that he handled the factions of the Republican Party well, bringing leaders of each faction into his cabinet and forcing them to cooperate.

Lincoln successfully defused the Trent affair, a war scare with Britain, in 1861. Under his leadership, the Union took control of the border slave states at the start of the war.

Additionally, he managed his own reelection in the 1864 presidential election. Copperheads and other opponents of the war criticized Lincoln for refusing to compromise on the slavery issue. Conversely, the Radical Republicans, an abolitionist faction of the Republican Party, criticized him for moving too slowly in abolishing slavery. Even with these road blocks, Lincoln successfully rallied public opinion through his rhetoric and speeches; his Gettysburg Address is but one example of this.

At the close of the war, Lincoln held a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to speedily reunite the nation through a policy of generous reconciliation. His successor in the White House, Andrew Johnson, also wanted reconciliation among white Americans, but failed to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 was the first presidential assassination in American history. He has since consistently been ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents. (more detailed reading of Abraham Lincoln at Wikipedia)

Garborg championed the use of Landsmål (now known as Nynorsk, or New Norwegian), as a literary language; he translated the Odyssey into it. He founded the weekly Fedraheim in 1877, in which he urged reforms in many spheres including political, social, religious, agrarian, and linguistic. He was married to Hulda Garborg.

Guiterman was born of American parents in Vienna, graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1891, and was married in 1909 to Vida Lindo. He was an editor of the Woman’s Home Companion and the Literary Digest. In 1910, he co-founded the Poetry Society of America, and later served as its president in 1925-26.

An example of his humor is a poem that talks about modern progress, with rhyming couplets such as “First dentistry was painless;/Then bicycles were chainless”. It ends on a more telling note:

“Now motor roads are dustless,
The latest steel is rustless,
Our tennis courts are sodless,
Our new religions, godless.”

Another Guiterman poem, “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness“, illustrates the philosophy also incorporated into his humorous rhymes:

1. As a result of my philosophy, I wasn’t even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn’t hate him. I hated what he was doing.

2. By not caring too much about what people think, I’m able to think for myself and propagate ideas which are very often unpopular. And I succeed.

3. I get people to truly accept themselves unconditionally, whether or not their therapist or anyone loves them.

4. I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn’t love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression.

5. I think the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. We need to teach every child how to rarely seriously disturb himself or herself and how to overcome disturbance when it occurs.

6. Let’s suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

7. People don’t just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.

8. People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.

9. The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

10. There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

11. We teach people that they upset themselves. We can’t change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

1. Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

2. Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

3. It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

4. It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.

1. Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

2. No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

3. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.

4. In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

5. I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

6. Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

7. The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.