Lincoln Editor

              October - December 2006 Volume 6 Number 4
NEW RESEARCH ASSISTANT BEGINS WORK IN D.C.
The project has hired Melanie Miller as a research
assistant to assist staff already in place at the National
Archives in College Park, Maryland. Miller began work in
November. She is a graduate student at the University of
Maryland and will work for the project on a part-time basis
while she finishes a master’s degree in history.
Miller earned her bachelor’s degree in history at
Douglass College, the Women’s College of Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey. She has worked as an archives
technician at the National Archives and Records
STEADY PROGRESS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
In September 2006, Associate Director John Lupton began
working at the National Archives in College Park,
Maryland. He replaced Director Daniel Stowell, who had
worked there for three months to train new employees Ed
Bradley and Karen Needles and to research in several
record groups. Lupton continued to supervise Bradley’s and
Needles’s progress in addition to examining records of the
Department of the Interior. After overseeing the hiring and
training of new employee Melanie Miller, Lupton returned
to Springfield at the end of November leaving a well-trained
and experienced team of researchers to continue steady work
at the National Archives.
After six months, the project has located more than
four thousand documents either by or to Abraham Lincoln
with most of the documents coming from the Treasury, State,
and Interior Department records. As an example of the types
of records found, Lupton and Miller uncovered nearly fifty
letters written to Lincoln in 1849 regarding Interior
Department appointments in Illinois. As the only Whig
representative from Illinois in the Thirtieth Congress, Lincoln
received letters from people across the state—not just from
constituents in his congressional district—recommending
others for land office appointments or hoping to secure a
position for themselves. Six of these letters have an
endorsement by Lincoln directing it to the Interior
Karen Needles, Ed Bradley, and John Lupton Department for consideration.
at work at Archives II
Administration and was a Consortium on Race, Gender,
and Ethnicity Scholar at the University of Maryland.
At the 2005 National
Women’s Studies Conference, she
presented a paper entitled
“Intersections of Representations,
Images, and Agency by Gender,
Race, and Ethnicity.” A native of
New Jersey, Miller resides in Silver
Spring, Maryland.