Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness."
"My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.
Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.
When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.
While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.
Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.
Ten score and three years ago, a man was sent to Earth to destroy
slavery, unite a broken country and vanquish vicious vampires.
Abraham Lincoln was not only our
16th president, but he was also on a lifelong mission to destroy these undead, blood sucking devils.
But the vampires that the Great Emancipator sets out to destroy are
not your teenage sister's sparkly, lovesick, whining vampires.
Early in his life, Lincoln discovered that vampires have been a part of
American history since the first European settler hopped off a boat and that the slave trade keeps vampires under control for food.
Lincoln then made a vow: "I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in
America."
The future president tried to do just that. He drives stakes into a few
of the vampires here. He cuts some of their heads off there. He even
lights a few on fire. Up and down the Mississippi, he chops through the
undead like he's clearing a forest for some creepy railroad.
At least that's the picture painted by Seth Grahame-Smith in his novel
"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." The book became a best seller and a blockbuster movie in part because it is an interesting cross between fact and fiction.
But the sad truth is that what most of us know about American History comes from Hollywood.
1) Is Seth Grahame-Smith’s book a Primary or Secondary source?
2) What about the Journal his work is based on? Primary or Secondary?
5) Why did we really fight the Civil War? What was the outcome?
