Todd blue dorn biography of abraham

During last month's US presidential inauguration, as ever during these quadrennial celebrations, fierce interest focused on the First Lady. Much was made of Melania Trump's dresses, her enigmatic smiles, and especially the navy-blue wide-brimmed boater-style hat she wore for the swearing-in. Was the hat a deliberate choice, to shield her face from the prying eyes of the public?

No one could say, but legions speculated. How unenviable is the lot of the President's wife, lacking in formal power but constantly judged — expected to be immaculately turned out, and to remain, in conduct, ever above reproach. Her husband, who emancipated the slaves, and saved the union, enjoys near-universal adulation, while Mrs Lincoln has been the subject of criticism and disapproval since her first days in Washington in when she embarked on plans for a lavish redecoration of the White House.

She travelled to New York for a shopping spree, and reporters followed her everywhere. One for The New York Herald wrote: "Mrs Lincoln, who has been engaged since her arrival in making large purchases at some of the leading merchants, was out yesterday enjoying herself in the usual way. Such reports did not go down well in the besieged, wartime capital.

Lincoln became the first president to

Indeed, the loyalty of the First Lady, who hailed from a slave-holding family, and had three half-brothers in the Confederate Army, was questioned throughout the Civil War. In , her own son had her committed to an insane asylum. And yet today, in the era of TikTok, X, Instagram and Facebook, where social esteem rises and falls capriciously on clicks and likes, the maligned Mary Todd Lincoln is getting some compassionate reassessment on the stage, most particularly in Mrs President, a new play by US historian, writer and artist John Ransom Phillips opening this week at London's Charing Cross Theatre.

Brady declares he has the power to do that. Future," he says. In Ransom Phillips' depiction, Mrs Lincoln demands to be addressed as Mrs President, and engages in an on-going verbal tug of war with Brady over how she should be portrayed. The play asks who controls the revelatory public image, the subject or the artist?