The new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois offers experience over history. “The blurring of history for the sake of entertainment may not be something new. After all, the village of New Salem, about a 20-minute drive from Springfield, was where Lincoln tended store and began his political career, but the town didn’t survive. So in the 1920’s and 30’s, it was “reconstructed”; it is an invented historical village. But the new museum, because of technological power alone, risks making invention seem like fact. It also enshrines a notion that the best way to know anything about politics and history is to understand personality, and even then only in a simplified fashion. Maybe it will lead to curiosity and further inquiry; maybe not.”