On Monday, I mentioned some recent historical work that has been done about the painting depicted here–Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln. Historian Susan Schulten of the University of Denver has argued that the map in the lower-right-hand corner helped frame Lincoln’s thinking about emancipation as a wartime measure. You can read all about her argument on the New York Times “Disunion” blog, which is a blog that features Civil War historians writing about the period. The whole blog is worth checking out, but the Schulten post is especially interesting.
