Ed Baptist and Elaine Engst
with Ed Baptist and Elaine Engst
Archivist Elaine Engst is director of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University's Kroch Library. She received a B.A. in history from William Smith College and an M.A. in history from Cornell. Since 1979 she has served in Cornell's libraries, where she has curated exhibitions and given numerous presentations. She is active in the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and in 1996 she was named an SAA Fellow, the society's highest form of recognition.
Edward Baptist grew up in North Carolina and graduated from Georgetown University. In 2002, after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, he published his first book, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War. He is currently an associate professor of history at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on the history of slavery and of the nineteenth-century United States.
References
- Gettysburg Exhibit Exhibition will be on view in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, from October 20, 2009 - April 16, 2010.
- Cornell Rare Manuscripts Collection Gettysburg Address
- Cornell University Library
- New Student Reading Project 2008
Among its greatest treasures, Cornell University owns one of five known copies of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln's handwriting. President Lincoln wrote out the manuscript at the request of historian and diplomat George Bancroft, whose stepson, Colonel Alexander Bliss, was collecting manuscripts for a lithographed volume of facsimiles to be sold at a fund-raising event to assist wounded soldiers.
Lincoln agreed and sent the document to Bancroft. To his dismay, Bancroft found that Lincoln had written on both sides of the paper, making it unsuitable for reproduction. He asked the president for another copy, which Lincoln sent. This second manuscript, which was reproduced in the volume, now resides in the Lincoln Room at the White House.
The first copy remained in the Bancroft family until it was sold to a dealer in 1929 by Bancroft's grandson, Dr. Wilder Bancroft, a professor of chemistry at Cornell. Eventually, it was purchased by Mrs. Nicholas H. Noyes, who presented the manuscript to Cornell in 1949 in honor of her husband. Cornell's copy of the Gettysburg Address is now part of the library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.