Lincoln Spotting

This morning, NPR reporter Kitty Eisele told the story of going to the Library of Congress to see the newly discovered photographs of Lincoln's second inagural. They had been misfiled in the folders alloted to U.S. Grant.

Eisele worked with Ken Burns on the Civil War documentary, so she had spent months in the LoC photo files at an earlier point in her life. Returning to see a new glimpse of history was obviously inspiring to her. She shared her impressions of the photos, grounded in her knowledge of the time, and it was just a little bit like being at the inauguration.

How did the photos happen to get found? Well, the LoC has loaded its photo archive to the web now. So a researcher who was looking through the Grant files found the Lincoln photos.