Reviews Lincoln's early years as a farmer and his significant impact on U.S. agriculture, including the establishment of the USDA and the beginnings of the National Agricultural Library. Also includes various full text documents and agricultural Acts from the 1860s.

Edward Everett (April 11, 1794 - January 15, 1865) was a Whig Party politician from Massachusetts. Everett was elected to the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate, and also served as President of Harvard University, United States Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Britain, …

Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author and historian, and a frequent contributor to the "New York Review of Books". In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America," which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. Wills is an adjunct professor of history, both American and cultural, …

Theodore Parker (August 24 1810, Lexington, Massachusetts - May 10 1860, Florence, Italy) was an American Transcendentalist and reforming minister of the Unitarian church. In 1850, Parker was the first to use the phrase, "of all the people, by all the people, for all the people" which later influenced Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. In words made famous by Martin Luther King, Jr. a century later, …

William Saunders was a botanist and landscape architect. Born in Saint Andrews, Scotland, he served as the first Master (President) of the National Grange, and became the U.S. Department of Agriculture's first botanist and landscape architect. Saunders designed the park system in Washington, D.C., and oversaw the planting of 80,000 trees in the city. He was a founder of the Grange Order of Patrons of Husbandry.

William Tyler Page, was best known for his authorship of the American's Creed. He was born in Frederick, Maryland, a descendant of Carter Braxton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; and of the tenth U.S. President John Tyler. In 1881, at the age of 13, he travelled to Washington D.C. to serve as a page at the U.S. Capitol, thus beginning a 61-year-long career as a national public servant.

George Henry Johnson (May 1, 1894 - August 30, 2006) was, at the time of his death, California's oldest man at 112 years of age and one of the few surviving veterans of the First World War. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1917, and served in the Fourteenth Company, 154th Battalion. He did not see combat during the war (but served at Fort Greene, North Carolina and Fort Dix, New Jersey), …

William Roedel Rathvon, CSB, (December 31 1854– March 2 1939), sometimes incorrectly referred to as William V. Rathvon, is the only known eye-witness to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, of the over 10,000 witnesses, to have left an audio recording of his impressions of that experience in 1938, one year before his death. A graduate of Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and a successful businessman, …

Oscar Benjamin Cintas was a prominent sugar and railroad magnate who served as Cuba’s ambassador to the United States from 1932 until 1934. He was educated in London, and became director of the Cuban Railroad Company’s sugar mills in Punta Alegre, Jatibonico and Jobabo. He was president of Railroad Equipment of Brazil and Argentina, director of the American Car and Foundry and the American Locomotive Sales Corporation, and had business interests in Europe.

Richard Heffner (b. August 5, 1925) is the creator and host of The Open Mind (talk show), a public affairs television show first broadcast in 1956. Currently University Professor of Communications and Public Policy at Rutgers University, he is the author of "A Documentary History of the United States," a verbatim anthology of important public documents in American history, among them the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, …

Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was a Polish engineer and a pioneer of sound-on-film technology. Tykociner was born into a Jewish family in Włoclawek, a town in the Polish territory then under Russian control. He worked for the Marconi company in 1901 in London at the time the first radio signal was transmitted across the Atlantic. At the age of eighteen he came to the United States. In New York City he met Nikola Tesla and became an expert in shortwave radio.