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.Book after book has been writtenexposing Dishonest Abe for what he was a bloody tyrant.You bubble-headed ultra liberal college professors insist on perpetu-ating the Lincoln Myth and trying to make a god of that backwards125William D.PedersonHitler.No wonder our kids don t know anything.The uneducated can-not educate!Whenever ya ll bring your damyankee [sic] propagandists downhere to spread their lies about that Illinois white trash, our boys fromthe Sons of Confederate Veterans will always be there to return fire.We will not suffer idiots to pollute our land.7Perhaps more surprising is how few protesters the lecture now draws.Theoverwhelming majority of Shreveporters have been very open to the Lincolnlecture series.The Lincoln lecture series has spawned several other Summer Teach-ers Institutes also funded by the LEH on broader topics, including WhiteHouse first couples, the American presidency, and the U.S.Constitution.The American Studies program also funds three local teachers to attend theSummer Teachers Institute at Colonial Williamsburg.A few years ago, the American Studies program launched a second annuallecture series on James Madison.In fact, the first non-great chief executiveto be covered by the triennial presidential conference series was held onMadison in 2006.The rationale was that federalism and Lincoln s leadershipstyle are the two greatest gifts of American government to world democracy.Appropriately, Frank Williams delivered the first lecture in the series.By the late 1990s, a number of events came together that further devel-oped my interest in Abraham Lincoln s legacy abroad.In the fall of 1998,unexpectedly a political science major enrolled in my introductory class.Asit turned out, she was from Lincoln, Argentina.By the next summer, I mademy first trip to Latin America to deliver a speech for the ILA at Lincoln Col-lege in Lincoln, Argentina.If Lincoln had created a town in his own image,it might resemble this modest-size town, one of only two outside the UnitedStates named in his honor.The success of that trip led to the formation ofan ILA chapter there and of many subsequent links between Shreveport andLincoln, Argentina.In December 2002, I had a second opportunity to visit Latin America, thistime Havana, Cuba, and the surrounding area.Probably no area per squaremile in the world outside the United States has more tributes to America ssixteenth president.In part, this is due to the influence of its independenceleader, José Martí, who admired the Great Emancipator.It continued beforeand during the reign of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro.There are Lincolnstamps, statues, and schools named in his honor, as well as a hotel in down-town Havana.Not only do liberals and conservatives identify with him, butso do dictators, whether capitalist or Communist.A few years earlier, the influence of Frank Williams the collector finallycaught up with me.Up to that time, I purposely had tried to avoid collecting126Crossing Borders to an International Lincolnanything.Because I lacked space for even books, if I collected anything itwould have to be small.From elementary school, I had kept a two-volumestamp collection, though that was from a short-lived hobby that lasted onlyfrom the third to the sixth grade.Nonetheless, during those years I had taughtmyself more geography and the names and faces of leaders from abroad thanmy peers, and even my teachers.Though I could not recall any stamps fromabroad with Lincoln s image on them, I decided that resuming that hobbymight make for a simple solution to being around a major collector.The as-sumption was that this could be easily accomplished with a single volumeof stamps, since surely there could not be too many foreign stamps withLincoln on them.Twenty-some volumes later, I now have virtually everystamp (and numerous duplicates) bearing Lincoln s image.These stamps(first-day covers, souvenir sheets, and the like) eventually formed the begin-nings of large framed wall displays for what would become the InternationalLincoln Center.In 2001, the American Studies program (the Washington, D.C., programand conference and lecture series) was transformed into the InternationalLincoln Center by the LSU Board of Supervisors.8 It is now housed in an officeand a vacated classroom set up to display Lincoln items from abroad.As thebest-known political figure outside the United States, virtually every areaof the world has a stamp, street, statue, school, or some other tribute in hishonor.9 I have had the opportunity to present several papers on Lincoln inIndia, the largest democracy in the world and the nation now with the largestnumber of English speakers.Lincoln was admired by both Mahatma Gandhiand Jawaharlal Nehru, India s founding prime minister, and is featured inthe country s secondary school textbooks.Moreover, in my role as the di-rector of the Association of Third World Studies, I have had the additionalopportunity to visit several other countries in 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