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To today's ears, Abraham Lincoln was himself a house divided, a man torn between his morally and intellectually evolving disgust for slavery and his political instinct to not outrun the turtle's pace of progress. In other words: If you think Honest Abe was the unblemished patron saint of equality, you will be disappointed early and often by his 1858 Illinois senatorial smackdown against the incumbent Stephen A. Douglas, where the Slavery Question was the only question. Does Lincoln - played in this reenactment with snark and subtlety by David Strathairn - say slavery is wrong? Yes. Does he call a freed slave his equal? Nope. He may be thinking it, but he declares quite the opposite.

Still, he's the lesser of two evils in this insanely intense battle of metaphors and egos. To the Democrat Douglas - a fiery pontificator, as played by Richard Dreyfuss - the issue is something to be voted on state by state, and he has no problem referring to slaves as property. Lincoln calls them, you know, people. The seven three-hour debates were (mostly) civil, unmoderated and epic, with each candidate granted huge blocks of uninterrupted stage time. It's a long haul, but episodic and easy to hit pause and return to later. It's also kinda fun to hear such grandiloquent men of high standing twist each other's words and take personal jabs. It delighted the crowd then as it should listeners 150 years later.

Text courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Association, as presented in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.
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Since 1984, Newsweek has been renowned for its vivid, in-depth special election coverage of the ordeal of running for the presidency. A year before the election, Newsweek assigns reporters to get inside the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Newsweek promises not to publish any information until after the votes are cast, and in exchange, the reporters receive remarkable access. They travel with the candidates, are there at crucial turning points and confidential meetings, and uncover stories not covered in day-to-day reporting. In "A Long Time Coming," a compelling narrative by Evan Thomas, Newsweek shares the inside stories from one of the most exciting elections in recent history, illuminating the personalities and events that influenced the outcome, and taking stock of the key players and key issues for the new administration.