For many Americans, to see Lincoln whole is to glimpse ourselves in part—our hours of triumph and of grace, and our centuries of failures and of derelictions. This is why his story is neither too old nor too familiar. For so long as we are buffeted by the demands of democracy, for so long as we struggle to become what we say we already are—the world’s last, best hope, in Lincoln’s phrase—we will fall short of the ideal more often than we meet the mark. It is a fact of American history that we are not always good, but that goodness is possible. Not universal, not ubiquitous, not inevitable—but possible.