dr. james cornelius, curator of the lincoln collection who is a living, breathing encyclopedia of all things linkedin, those are the good things. the terrible thing is when you are here doing research you are surrounded by the 15,000 books about abraham lincoln that have already been written. it is a stark reminder that anybody who comes here and asks you to put another book on that shelf really has some explaining to do right at the beginning. that is what i want to start off doing because i came to linkedin in a backwards way, his foreign policy which is something that has been written about very infrequently and my background is in journalism, not academia. i was foreign correspondent for many years mostly in the middle east reporting on the ground in places like syria and libya and yemen, always used to covering foreign affairs and the street level, several years back i was going to stick a step back and look at the framework of american foreign policy, the traditions of american foreign policy i started reading, started studying this from the early days of the republic through a post wo