July 28, 2025

by Lauren Ferguson

Dr. Stacy Lynn, assistant editor of the Jane Addams Paper Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey, spends her days documenting Jane Addams’ life to produce a digital, freely-accessible website containing the papers of the social worker, suffragist and progressive icon.

But before she assumed her current role at Ramapo, she spent almost 25 years as an associate editor of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.

“I love working with Jane Addams every day. She really is almost every bit as cool as Abraham Lincoln, maybe even more so in some ways,” Lynn said. “But there is just something about Lincoln. I mean, everybody recognizes him. Everybody knows a little something about him. Every generation wants to write their story about Lincoln.”

And the longtime Lincoln scholar just wrote her own story about the 16th President of the United States.

Lynn’s book, Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln’s Life and Legacy, was released by Southern Illinois University Press in June. In the part biography, part memoir, she shares 30 historical and personal essays, featuring the stories of more than 90 women, including herself.

Among the women featured are obvious choices like First Lady Mary Lincoln, Lincoln’s two mothers and his sisters. The book also includes stories of some of Lincoln’s female friends, as well as women from his law practice, some of whom came to him for issues such as divorce cases, and those who wrote to him during the Civil War.

Lynn said with so many women writing and visiting Lincoln, she could not include everyone.

“The hardest choices I made were during the Presidency because so many women wrote to Lincoln and went to see Lincoln at the White House during the Civil War. It was harder to choose, but I’m a historian, so I chose the stories that I could richly document in some way, either because these women left letters or I had hard evidence about their lives,” she explained.

After spending about 15 months writing the book, Lynn thought she had everything down. Then she read it over, and made a realization: “I have written a biography of Lincoln through the collective stories of women, but I’m one of the women,” she said.

Lynn said she has a professional relationship with Lincoln as a scholar and an editor of his papers, and also a personal relationship as someone who found great inspiration in his life. After losing her own daughter, Mackenzie, in 2014, she said she was able to relate to the grief the Lincoln’s felt when they lost their children, Eddie and Willie.

“It kind of blurs the lines of biography and also memoir,” Lynn told NPR Illinois. “And I think the result is this selection of stories of all of these women who loved Lincoln into being, and the women like me who continue to be inspired by him today.”

Dr. Stacy Lynn poses at a conference where she gave a talk on the Jane Addams Paper Project.

Lynn also finds inspiration in the “curious and interested” Ramapo students she works closely with at the Jane Addams Paper Project, which is housed in the School of Humanities and Global Studies. She said many students have become excellent transcribers and researchers, and they give her hope for the future of the digital humanities.

“Given the nature of the way historians are going to have to do history in the future, the digital component of history and the digital humanities is going to need to continue to thrive, and I love that we are exposing so many students to it,” she said.

Lynn is also the author of two additional books related to Lincoln. Mary Lincoln: Southern Girl, Northern Woman was published in 2015, and The Jury in Lincoln’s America was published in 2012.