The 150th anniversary of the election of Lincoln to the presidency was a few days ago (6 November). The anniversary attracted considerable attention in the blogosphere and the media. See here, here, and here. The endlessly debatable issue of whether the Civil War could have been avoided had Lincoln lost the election was debated in the Washington Post. See here. The experts who commented on this question included such eminent historians as Kate Masur (here) and David Blight (here). The Abraham Lincoln blog, which is doubtless being maintained from beyond the grave, had a post on the subject. See here.
This anniversary is interesting to me because my students are in the process of reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
The Past Speaks 
I loved Team of Rivals. How does it fit in with the curriculum in your course? Are you exploring the approach to telling history? The Lincoln content? The discussion of political machinations?
The main things I wanted students to get from the book were: the personal rivalries of the men, the nature of the early Republican party and abolitionist thinking, and a good grasp of the sequence of American political history.
It is indeed a first-class book!