Fascinating facts and a few mysteries amid the Lincoln artifacts


Senior military historian and curator Gordon L. Jones is standing in the middle of an Atlanta History Center gallery packed with powerhouse documents, literal pages from early American history, his eyes focusing on something almost invisible.

It's a string, not much more than a thread really, tying the left temple to the frame of Abraham Lincoln's wire-rimmed spectacles, one of the items in his pockets the night he was assassinated.

"It's probably Lincoln's repair. His glasses broke and he got a piece of string and fixed it," Jones speculates. "Here's a guy who's literally installed in marble, memorialized, but he literally put his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us, and this is a reminder of that."

"With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition," opening Saturday, delivers both what Jones calls the "big-ticket stuff" (such as the Gettysburg Address) and more human-scale objects....

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