Edward Achorn on Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, & Slavery

[00:00:00] Charlie Chieppo: Well, hi everybody and welcome to The Learning Curve. My name is Charlie Chieppo and I am going to be a guest host today along with Barry Anderson, who is a former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, as opposed to myself, who is a former, took six years to get out of law school and, you know, never looked back. But, uh, anyway, I’m thrilled to be here with you, Barry. Welcome.

[00:00:46] Barry Anderson: I’m delighted to be here as well. Unfortunately, nobody inquires about your law school career, and they’re not inquiring about mine, and that’s probably a good thing as well.

[00:00:55] Charlie Chieppo: That’s a good thing, yes. Thank God for that. So, as always, we’re going to start with our stories of the week. Barry, what do you have for us this week?

[00:01:03] Barry Anderson: So I have a story. It’s actually a press release from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which announces a collaboration between NASA and the U. S. Department of Education. That press release references an event that occurred earlier this week. The The purpose of the event is to announce a partnership between NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and the Education Department to support science and technology STEM activities in high schools around the country, well, high schools generally.

[00:01:34] The press release is unremarkable, it’s a press release after all, and certainly as a matter of sort of public policy. I think we’d all agree that, you know, these kinds of programs can be helpful. My sort of maybe cynical, semi cynical question is whether this is a good use of resources from the standpoint of NASA and its activities, and whether it’s going to make much difference in a country that educates something north of 50 million public school students.

[00:02:05] I guess any port in a storm, and it’s better to do this than not, and I wish them well. They’ve signed a memorandum of understanding, and this is part of an effort to improve science and technology education in our public schools. That’s a good thing. I hope they have some success. I’m somewhat skeptical about the whole project.

[00:02:26] Charlie Chieppo: Well Barry, I can tell you this, they’re going to have one big fan in my son who is completely obsessed with anything having to do with NASA and the space program. So, but I guess they’ve already captured him. They got to get the new folks.

[00:02:41] Barry Anderson: The reason I selected it is that this is something space law, development of resource recovery in space and so forth have all been topics that I’ve been very interested in.

[00:02:50] Yeah. And watching what’s happening in the private sector as opposed to what’s happening in the public sector. The public sector in space development is, frankly, maybe the story of our time.

[00:03:00] Charlie Chieppo: Oh, you mean like with SpaceX and all that kind of stuff?

[00:03:03] Barry Anderson: SpaceX and New Glenn and some of these other things that are happening.

[00:03:06] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.

[00:03:07] Barry Anderson: Yeah. It’s very significant. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. But maybe some of these students who benefit from this program will be those next generation of private sector space development leaders. So, Godspeed and good luck to everybody.

[00:03:19] Charlie Chieppo: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Well, my story is about sort of what is an ongoing issue, which is the issue of students using and having their cell phones in the classroom.

[00:03:32] So, I have to admit that this is one of the rare times that I find myself aligned with the majority of educators. Now, To disclose my biases, I’m a parent of two special needs kids, and I’ve been fighting the battle against too much screen time for as long as I can remember. It was really captured best by the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, I thought.

[00:03:52] He said earlier this year that you’ve got a situation where kids are not only trying to learn, but they’re simultaneously on their phones, they’re texting their friends, they’re replying to messages on social media, they’re scrolling through their feeds, he said. It makes it very difficult to not only learn, but But it makes it hard in school to build relationships and friendships.

[00:04:12] And I’ve certainly seen that. So according to one poll, teachers said they have to discipline students for using their phones five times a week, and nearly half have been forced to confiscate a student’s device. More than 80 percent of teachers have been forced to disconnect their phones. believe a ban will lead to better student performance.

[00:04:30] Dr. Eric Alsera, who is the chief medical officer at a behavioral health hospital in New Jersey, says smartphones allow children access to educational resources and to be able to quickly fact check and help increase digital literacy, which is relevant as global dependence on technology increases. I mean that’s certainly true, but from my experience that is It’s aspirational, at best, that that is what they’re actually using their phones for in the classroom.

[00:04:58] Right now, only Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana have statewide policies that restrict students access to their phone during school hours. Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, and Indiana require school districts to implement policies that reduce a child’s phone usage in schools, but allows the district to actually figure out exactly what the policy should be.

[00:05:20] That strikes me as probably the right approach, but we shall see. After the break, we will get to our interview with Ed Acorn, the author of two books on Abraham Lincoln, and we will be back in a moment.

[00:05:48] Barry Anderson: Edward Acorn is the author of two critically acclaimed books about Abraham Lincoln, including his celebrated new book, and the subject of our program today, The Lincoln Miracle, Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History, which Holzer Lincoln Forum Book Prize. The Lincoln Institute Book Prize, the Julie Award Howe Prize for Nonfiction, and the Lincoln Group of New York’s Award of Achievement.

[00:06:13] An impressive list of accomplishments. His earlier book, Every Drop of Blood, the momentous second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, published in 2020, was named one of the best books of that year by The Economist magazine. He is also the author of two classic baseball books, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey 59 and 84.

[00:06:34] The latter was named by The Economist as one of the six great books about baseball. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and a recipient of the Yankee Quill Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. We welcome Edward Acorn to The Learning Curve. In the last several years, you’ve written two excellent books on Abraham Lincoln.

[00:06:55] Who’s had over 16, 000 books and articles written about him. Would you briefly share with our listeners your background as a noted author on baseball and a career in journalism? How on earth did you decide to write about Lincoln?

[00:07:11] Edward Achorn: Well, yes, I’ve been, I was in journalism for 41 years. I’m retired from that now, but I covered, you know, local, state, and national politics during that career.

[00:07:21] So I thought that gave me a good background writing about Lincoln. But initially, I decided to write about baseball history because I loved early baseball history and Providence, which was the city my newspaper, the Providence Journal, was set in, had a National League Baseball team and it had a basketball team, so, pitcher who went to the Hall of Fame, who won 59 games in a single season as a pitcher. So I wanted to write about him, and that’s how I got into history. I wrote about this great guy named Old Haas Radborn, who was also the first human being ever photographed flipping the middle finger, so that he was a quite an interesting figure.

[00:08:05] And then I wrote a second book about early baseball called The Summer of Beer and Whiskey. which was about this crazy early major league that was run by these brewers and distillers and so forth and they used baseball to sell their product at the games and that was a very fun book that did very well and I decided to I’ve spent my life reading about Lincoln, admiring Lincoln, really reflecting on what he had to do to save this country, and I decided I wanted to write about him, and specifically about the Second Inaugural Address, which I think is one of the great documents of American culture and history.

[00:08:48] And I went to every publisher in the country, and they thought I was, they sort of typecast me as a baseball writer, but I finally found this wonderful publisher, Grove Atlantic, who picked me up, and that’s how I got into Lincoln.

[00:09:03] Barry Anderson: And the rest of the baseball books, all I’ll say about that, it appears that beer and baseball have a very long history, then.

[00:09:10] Edward Achorn: It does, in fact. The guy who bought the original St. Louis Cardinals was a grocery store owner who sold beer on the site, and he actually Just went into baseball to sell beer, that was his interest, so he became quite a funny character in early baseball.

[00:09:30] Barry Anderson: Well, let’s move from beer and baseball to Abraham Lincoln, and we want to talk today about your 2023 book, The Lincoln Miracle, Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History.

[00:09:40] It covers the wider historical context leading to Lincoln’s 1860 Republican Party nomination for president. Could you give our listeners a short overview of the book, and what citizens and students today should know about this improbable political rise of Abraham Lincoln.

[00:09:58] Edward Achorn: The book just covers one week, pretty much, the period of the convention, and I just wanted to explain to people how Lincoln went in as this complete underdog.

[00:10:10] Nobody envisioned him for the presidency, really. Except Lincoln, maybe, he tried, he was trying to do this, I think, to strengthen his political footprint in Illinois. But he went in as the longest underdog, and there’s all sorts of twists and turns during that week. And if Lincoln had not won that nomination. I don’t think this country would exist today. So I wanted readers to understand what a, what a miracle this thing was that Lincoln managed to win that nomination.

[00:10:44] Barry Anderson: In 1958, Lincoln had lost a high profile Illinois U. S. election. The Senate race against Stephen A. Douglas, and as an aside here, I should mention to listeners that one of the really best sources for that particular race is Harry Jaffa’s book, Crisis of the House Divided, which I just happened to reread in preparation for today, but you know, he was ultimately unsuccessful in that race, and since his one election.

[00:11:06] term in Congress. He hadn’t held public office for a decade. I wonder if you could quickly sketch for us his early career as a frontier lawyer and politician and his shrewd political maneuvering between 1858 and mid May 1860 that opened a path for this improbable Republican presidential nomination in 1860.

[00:11:28] Edward Achorn: Yeah, Lincoln had risen as a state representative. He served four terms as a state rep. And then he had run for the Senate two different times, and that was the job he really wanted more than any other. He didn’t even think of the presidency. In fact, he laughed about it. His wife thought he was fit for the presidency, and he just laughed at that and said, imagine a sucker like me for president.

[00:11:55] And so he was very popular with Illinois people, but Illinois was essentially a strongly Democratic And Lincoln was a Whig, so he had a real struggle during his career. What happened to Lincoln was he had kind of a midlife crisis. He had served in Congress, and he was just going back to the law. He had not been able to get a government job that he desperately wanted.

[00:12:24] He went back to his law career and he started thinking about what was happening in the country in terms of slavery. And he just, it was almost like on the road to Damascus, he just woke up and realized, I have to fight this fight. And that’s why he got into the race in 1855 for the Senate and 1858 for the Senate.

[00:12:50] And he lost both of those. And he thought his career was finished. After he lost that second Senate run against Douglas, he in fact, the Republicans in the state got more votes than, than the Democrats, but Lincoln, the way the, the districts were apportioned, the state representative districts, Douglas won the Senate because back then the legislature’s appointed the senators, not the voters directly.

[00:13:18] So from 1858 to May 1860, Lincoln worked as a sort of behind the scenes, urging the party not to go down these side tracks, not to get caught up in too many issues. He just wanted them to focus on one issue, which was stopping the spread of slavery into the territories. Just let slavery exist where it exists and keep it from moving further.

[00:13:46] And this set him very strongly against the Democratic Party. So he was very practical, practical politician. He had learned from bitter defeats. He had learned from some successes. And he just tried to steer the Republican Party into a path of following just one strong issue above all else, and not to get bitterly divided on these side issues, and I think that was pretty brilliant on his part.

[00:14:19] He also tried to push himself forward by publishing, nobody was sort of interested, but he published the text of his debates with Stephen Douglas. Thank you very much. Douglass was the most popular Democrat in the country. He was the, he was sort of a young, rising Democratic star, and Lincoln almost toppled him as the Senator from Illinois, so he got a little bit of national notoriety out of that.

[00:14:46] So he published the debates. He had a Republican group in Ohio publish them. And he used that sort of as his platform to try to, to get some, uh, notoriety and recognition. But he was, as I said earlier, he was an absolute

[00:15:06] People talked about him as a possible vice presidential candidate at best, because Illinois was an important swing state, and that’s how it was going into the convention.

[00:15:18] Barry Anderson: That leads us to the convention itself, and in your book, you sketch how William Seward was the favorite. In 1859, he was a successful Republican U. S. Senator, an abolitionist, former governor of New York. He’d taken a tour of Great Britain, Europe, and the Middle East. He met with foreign dignitaries. Tremendous record of accomplishment, and in many ways, an admirable person. But could you talk to us a little bit more here today about how celebrated he was, his political rivalry with Lincoln, and how in 1860, he was bested in Chicago by this obscure, far less well known candidate, Abraham Lincoln?

[00:15:57] Edward Achorn: Yeah. Yes, well, Seward was really the superstar of the Republican Party. He was considered its founder and father in many ways. He was a nationally known senator. He was considered a brilliant strategist. He had the most money behind him because he came from New York. His political manager was a guy named Thurlow Weed, who was a newspaper editor, but he was a brilliant political strategist, and he had been advising.

[00:16:29] Candidates for many years in the Whig Party, and he had the best political machine in the country. And in fact, he brought thousands of people with him from New York to Chicago, where the convention was held, to create this sort of impression that Seward was inevitable. The base was behind him, the delegates loved him.

[00:16:50] What happened at that convention was that they discovered political professionals from around the country were nervous about Seward because he was Too controversial, and he was too well known, and in many ways, they turned away, they were looking for an alternative to Seward, because they were, you know, one of the things, I should mention this, but one of the things that surprised me most writing this book was That these delegates meeting in Chicago were not choosing who would make the best president of the United States in the midst of a crisis which everybody thought was coming.

[00:17:28] They were choosing a guy who could get them the most votes in that election. And that’s all they cared about was the job. Pretty much all they cared about was the jobs and the patronage. And they were worried the Seward would offend swing voters, and more, perhaps somebody not as famous wouldn’t be as scary to swing voters.

[00:17:48] And that’s how Lincoln’s team really sold him as an alternative to Seward.

[00:17:55] Barry Anderson: We’ve been hearing a lot about swing voters these days. What’s old is new again, I guess. Could you talk to us a little bit about the city of Chicago in 1860, the wigwam where the Republican convention was held, and the wider political landscape at the time that ultimately led to Lincoln’s election as president?

[00:18:14] I will just say when I was thinking Reading your book about Chicago, I was struck by how very much I would not want to live there now. It seems like an unpleasant place in 1860. Anyway, tell our listeners a little bit about this.

[00:18:29] Edward Achorn: Well, Chicago was sort of the symbol of the rising America, especially the northern states.

[00:18:36] And of course, Chicago was considered the northwest at the time, but is incredibly energetic. It was Perfectly positioned in the center of the country, near the Great Lakes, near the Mississippi River, to grow and expand. And it had grown in just 30 years from this little dinky town on the swampy Chicago River into one of the great cities of the world.

[00:19:03] It was connected by more railroad lines in 1860 than any city on the globe. Even though it only had something like 112, 000 residents at the time. So it was this very boisterous city. People went there to make money. There was a lot of pollution. I write about this in the book, how they were actually raising all the buildings downtown in Chicago so they could put down dirt and put in a sewer system because it was on such marshy land.

[00:19:33] And there was just terrible pollution and the rivers stank and everything, and this is, this is one of the prices of such extraordinary growth all throughout America, actually. Now, the wider political landscape was that, And that is obviously slavery was reaching a crisis point. The south was very determined to strengthen slavery and permit it to spread to other states because they were worried to other territories that would become states because they were worried it would spread.

[00:20:07] The political landscape was turning against slavery, and it was. The North was growing very fast. The North very strongly supported these democratic ideals, and they were worried, they sort of despised the South for being such bullies in the national political scene. There had been such things as a Southern congressman had struck down a Massachusetts senator, I almost killed them on the Senate floor in a fight over slavery, and people in the North had just had enough.

[00:20:43] They thought Washington had become too corrupt. They didn’t care about the North, and they were ready to look for somebody as an alternative to the Democrats that had controlled the national government for a long time.

[00:20:57] Charlie Chieppo: Ed, Charlie Chieppo here. Thank you for joining us.

[00:21:00] Edward Achorn: Hi, Charlie.

[00:21:01] Charlie Chieppo: And thank you for running all those columns of mine during your years at the Providence Journal. I’m glad you’ve moved on to bigger and better things. So, moving along, in your 2020 book, Every Drop of Blood, the momentous second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, we move forward to March 4th, 1865, when more than 700, 000 Americans had died in a civil war that tore the nation apart. Could you briefly share with us how you decided to write this book and the larger significance Lincoln’s second inaugural address serves in explaining the war, the horrors of slavery, and enormous loss of life on both sides?

[00:21:41] Edward Achorn: I spent my life admiring that speech. It’s only 700 words long. It’s about a six minute speech to deliver, and it’s the most poignant and powerful thing I, speech I think was ever delivered in American history. So I was very struck by that, and I wanted to look at, I started to notice looking at that day that all these famous.

[00:22:05] People intersected with Lincoln that day, and they all had very strong views about the war. So I thought I could tell the story of the Civil War, which I think is the most important story Americans have to know. I thought I could tell it through all these different characters, and especially through Lincoln, over a 24 hour period from March 3rd at night to March 4th at night, 1865.

[00:22:34] And I think just looking at the war through these people, it just brings it down to a level I think the reader can better understand. Just the pain, the suffering, the passions involved. And, uh, what Lincoln was up to on that day, which was to try desperately to heal the country. The war was coming to an end, everybody could see it, and Lincoln was desperate to bind the country together again after this brutal war.

[00:23:09] So I, I just, I love, I love looking at history from a very narrow perspective, in this case, 24 hours, because I think suddenly You’re no longer looking at history from 30, 000 feet up. You’re getting right to the ground level, and you understand that these are just human beings like the rest of us. They had no idea how things would turn out.

[00:23:34] They didn’t have all the omniscient knowledge of what was going on, and you get a very poignant and immediate understanding of what they were feeling and thinking when you look at a very narrow period of time.

[00:23:49] Charlie Chieppo: Well, I’m going to jump ahead, actually, because I was going to ask you about that and that sort of technique. So some of the folks you used, right, were Andrew Johnson, who was his vice president, who, you know, reportedly was drunk. Um, uh, Walt Whitman, the poet, Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, Frederick Douglass, and of course, the person who later was Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who was a famous actor at the time, correct?

[00:24:17] Edward Achorn: Yes. Yes, he was. Booth was one of the best known actors in America and he, he actually stalked Lincoln that day and I think he was planning to kill him that day at the Capitol, if you can believe that. That would be the biggest stage, uh, he could ever imagine, but he didn’t get to do that. Yes, also Frederick Douglass was there for the speech.

[00:24:40] They wouldn’t let him into the Capitol because he was a black man and there was awful racial prejudice at the time. But he listened to Lincoln’s speech, which was very powerful. He was a former slave. It was a very powerful statement about slavery. And he later showed up that night at the White House and they tried to throw him out of there, but he finally got through.

[00:25:05] and attended a reception at the White House and was able to shake Lincoln’s hand. And Lincoln, oh, Lincoln, when he saw him, he said, oh, there’s my old friend, Douglas. What did you think of the speech? And Douglas said, Mr. President, it was a divine effort. And I thought that was quite poignant. Douglas, I think, is one of the great thinkers and writers and thinkers of American history.

[00:25:30] He’s an extraordinary guy. And I, and his relationship with Lincoln was Rather rocky, and that’s part of the book. I look at how Douglas did not like Lincoln, did not even want him to be re elected, but he eventually came around to recognizing Lincoln was the one man who could turn this country around and end slavery.

[00:25:53] I look at Walt Whitman who was covering the inauguration for the New York Times that day, which I found fascinating, and he has some really wonderful descriptions of Lincoln that day. And so I looked at the war through his eyes. He had Come to Washington because his brother was wounded and he had stayed there and worked as a sort of nursing these really brutally injured soldiers and bringing them little gifts and stuff and I thought that was a way to get into just the shattering human cost of this war.

[00:26:31] And you also mentioned the Vice President, Andrew Johnson, who showed up at the inauguration embarrassingly drunk. It was another one of the burdens Lincoln had to carry. And people after the inauguration were saying like, God, I hope nothing ever happens to Lincoln. Can you imagine this guy as president? And of course, six weeks later, Booth killed Lincoln and Johnson was president.

[00:26:59] Charlie Chieppo: Wow. So one of the many other talents that Lincoln had that I don’t have, when he was in Congress, he taught himself Euclidean geometry. And in 1858, he mentioned Euclid and his geometric axioms in the famous Lincoln Douglas debates.

[00:27:15] Could you talk about Lincoln’s interest in Euclidean geometry and why a 19th century Illinois politician would reference an ancient Greek mathematician in debates and speeches?

[00:27:25] Edward Achorn: Isn’t that incredible? I mean, here’s a guy who grew up in a log cabin. He had no formal education, probably less than a year of what we would call elementary school.

[00:27:38] And he was completely self taught. And his slogan, somebody asked, you know, how to, how to become a lawyer. And he said, you got to just read the books and work, work, work is the main thing. And that’s what Lincoln did his whole life. He worked, worked, worked. to improve himself to understand. And he wanted to learn Euclidean geometry because he wanted to understand logic in the way to construct an argument better, which is an extraordinary way to go about it, but that’s, that’s how Lincoln’s mind worked.

[00:28:15] And his law partner, William Herndon, often laughed about this. He said Lincoln would be up there studying Euclidean geometry while all the other lawyers on the circuit, they had to travel around to courthouses, and so they would share a room together, you know, ten men or something, and they’d all be snoring loudly while Lincoln was sitting there reading Euclidean geometry.

[00:28:42] And Lincoln wanted to understand, he just wanted to know things his whole life. He wanted to understand better how things work and especially how logical processes work. He was a guy who was very, what he would do is think about problems and he would very slowly come to conclusions but once he reached them he was sort of rock solid because he had thought about them so much. So that’s how that played into his life.

[00:29:15] Charlie Chieppo: That’s amazing. That’s amazing to draw that connection between Euclidean geometry and better making an argument. I love that. Yeah. Finally, among Lincoln’s many talents were his genius ability to absorb the culture of his era and to use words, language, and his speeches to dramatically redefine our political discourse and American ideals.

[00:29:35] Could you talk about how Lincoln’s deep knowledge of history coupled with his many rhetorical gifts helped him? To win the war, preserve the Union, and ultimately abolish slavery.

[00:29:45] Edward Achorn: Yeah, Lincoln possessed really unique qualities of being able to muster language as sort of a political tool, a political weapon, and he really understood the common person because that’s what he had grown up with.

[00:30:02] And he was very familiar with the King James Bible, he had practically memorized it, which is the most beautifully written. Book I think that exists. I mean, it’s just wonderful. And also some of the works of William Shakespeare he studied very closely. He wasn’t widely read, but he was deeply read in just a few things. And that helps him to muster his arguments. Now in terms of American history Sounds like he chose pretty well, too, in terms of things to be deeply read.

[00:30:34] Charlie Chieppo: Yes, he did.

[00:30:35] Edward Achorn: Yeah. He did. And you can hear the sort of rhythm of those great books in his great speeches. I mean, he’s almost like the reincarnation of the King James Bible and William Shakespeare when he, when he delivers the second inaugural.

[00:30:52] But he would, you know, in terms of American history, He was passionately supportive of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders, and he believed in America because it was a meritocracy. Anyone, including him, could rise from nothing. and achieve a tremendous amount in America, and this is a very rare thing, still to this day, a very rare thing in the world.

[00:31:20] And so Lincoln was very tied into that. He pushed anything that would permit people who wanted to work hard to get ahead. So he supported public works projects and that kind of stuff. The Democrats were very against those. They thought it was, you know, a waste of government money and so forth. But he supported things that actually helped people get ahead economically.

[00:31:47] Charlie Chieppo: And we were hoping that you could close by reading a bit from one of the two Lincoln books, if you don’t mind.

[00:31:53] Edward Achorn: Yeah, I have a passage I like from my book about the second inauguration. I’m sort of describing the speech and quoting from it, but then I pause to say what, what I think about it. And here’s just a little passage.

[00:32:09] He was not giving a rousing patriotic speech that his northern audience could cheer with vile enthusiasm. He was making a plea to all Americans, to the victors as well as the vanquished, to To religious leaders on both sides, to the radical Republicans, as well as the embittered Confederates, to the new Congress and to himself as President, to set aside their moral superiority and humbly accept God’s will, all had sinned, all had failed miserably.

[00:32:40] After all of this, the forever forlorn mothers, the maimed men writhing on the battlefield and suffering in hospitals, the murder of black prisoners and starvation of white ones, the brutal insult of Sherman’s March leaving a gaping wound across the South. The hunger and deprivation on the home front, the wretched refugee camps filled with escaped slaves with no means of support or education.

[00:33:07] After all this, it was time for Americans to stop thinking about self righteousness. The only way forward was to recognize that all had been wrong and to treat each other with mercy. He was pleading for healing, not vengeance. Reconciliation, not continued strife and division. The shared people of this country had to put bitterness aside.

[00:33:31] There was no other way to end this nightmare. With malice toward none, with charity for all, Lincoln said.

[00:33:40] Charlie Chieppo: That’s an incredible job of just painting a picture of what he makes. Yeah, that’s great. Well, Ed, thank you so much. That was really, really fantastic, really interesting. Thanks for taking the time to join us.

[00:33:53] Edward Achorn: Well, thanks to all of you. It was great to be here.

[00:34:08] Charlie Chieppo: Well, that was a great interview with a very bright guy. Barry, thank you so much for joining me as guest host today. It’s been great to work with you once again.

[00:34:16] Barry Anderson: Greated to have been here, and any time spent talking about Abraham Lincoln is time well spent. I could

[00:34:22] Charlie Chieppo: not agree more. This week’s Tweet of the Week comes from Education Next, and it says, Zooming to class slows student learning.

[00:34:30] New evidence from West Point. I will definitely look that up, having taught for three and a half years, part of it during the pandemic when I certainly used plenty of Zoom to teach, so very interested in that. I hope you’ll check it out as well. We hope you’ll join us next week when the guests will be James Conway, who is a world history and psychology teacher at Revere High School in Massachusetts, and Ella Gardner, who’s a freshman at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a former Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education member and a Wellesley High School alumna.

[00:35:02] They’re going to be talking about MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, Which is a great subject of controversy in Massachusetts right now because we’re coming down to an initiative petition, a statewide election on whether to maintain it in November. So that’ll be interesting. We hope you’ll join us next week.