Commemorating Abraham Lincoln the Transnational Way

The book investigates the genesis, aesthetics, and ceremonial unveilings of three statues of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American President, in Edinburgh (1893), Manchester (1919), and London (1920). Using methodology from the fields of Visual Culture Studies, Memory Studies, and Transnational American Studies, the analysis demonstrates how the British and American Memory Actors used the installations of the Lincoln statues and the ceremonial unveiling performances to construct an imagined transnational collective identity by turning Abraham Lincoln into a transnational symbol unifying the peoples of the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Therefore, the statues not only function as manifestations of this Anglo-American friendship, but also as factors in the cultural construction and emergence of the Great Rapprochement on a racially induced basis which would later turn into the Special Relationship.