Reference no: EM133330572

Case Study: Read the following excerpt from an 1893 history textbook titled A Beginner's American History by D.H. Montgomery. Then, respond to the prompt that follows.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809, in a log shanty on a lonely little farm in Kentucky. When "Abe," as he was called, was seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, moved, with his family, to Indiana; there the boy and his mother worked in the woods and helped him build a new home. That new home was not so good or so comfortable as some of our cow-sheds are. It was simply a hut made of rough logs and limbs of trees. It had no door and no windows. One side of it was left entirely open; and if a roving Indian or a bear wanted to walk in to dinner, there was nothing whatever to stop him. In winter "Abe's" mother used to hang up some buffalo skins before this wide entrance, to keep out the cold, but in summer the skins were taken down, so that living in such a cabin was the next thing to living out-of-doors.
The Lincoln family stayed in that shed for about a year; then they moved into a new log cabin which had four sides to it. They seem to have made a new set of furniture for the new house. "Abe's" father got a large log, split it in two, smoothed off the flat side, bored holes in the under side and drove in four stout sticks for legs: that made the table. They had no chairs,-it would have been too much trouble to make the backs,-but they had three-legged stools, which Thomas Lincoln made with an axe, just as he did the table; perhaps "Abe" helped him drive in the legs.
In one corner of the loft of this cabin the boy had a big bag of dry leaves for his bed. Whenever he felt like having a new bed, all that he had to do was to go out in the woods and gather more leaves.
He worked about the place during the day, helping his father and mother. For his supper he had a piece of cornbread. After he had eaten it, he climbed up to his loft in the dark, by a kind of ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs. Five minutes after that he was fast asleep on his bed of sweet-smelling leaves, and was dreaming of hunting coons, or of building big bonfires out of brush.
"Abe's" mother was not strong, and before they had been in their new log cabin a year she fell sick and died. She was buried on the farm. "Abe" used to go out and sit by her lonely grave in the forest and cry. It was the first great sorrow that had ever touched the boy's heart. After he had grown to be a man, he said with eyes full of tears to a friend with whom he was talking: "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her."
At the end of a year Thomas Lincoln married again. The new wife that he brought home was a kind-hearted and excellent woman. She did all she could to make the poor, ragged, barefooted boy happy. After he had grown up and become famous, she said: "Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused to do anything I asked him: Abe was the best boy I ever saw."
There was a log schoolhouse in the woods quite a distance off, and there "Abe" went for a short time. At the school he learned to read and write a little, but after a while he found a new teacher, that was-himself. When the rest of the family had gone to bed, he would sit up and read his favorite books by the light of the great blazing logs heaped up on the open fire. He had not more than half a dozen books in all. They were "Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," Æsop's Fables, the Bible, a Life of Washington, and a small History of the United States. The boy read these books over and over till he knew a great deal of them by heart and could repeat whole pages from them.
Part of his evenings he spent in writing and ciphering. Thomas Lincoln was so poor that he could seldom afford to buy paper and pens for his son, so the boy had to get on without them. He used to take the back of the broad wooden fire-shovel to write on and a piece of charcoal for a pencil. When he had covered the shovel with words or with sums in arithmetic, he would shave it off clean and begin over again. If "Abe's" father complained that the shovel was getting thin, the boy would go out into the woods, cut down a tree, and make a new one; for as long as the woods lasted, fire-shovels and furniture were cheap.
By the time the lad was seventeen he could write a good hand, do hard examples in long division, and spell better than any one else in the county. Once in a while he wrote a little piece of his own about something which interested him; when the neighbors heard it read, they would say, "The world can't beat it."
At nineteen Abraham Lincoln had reached his full height. He stood nearly six feet four inches, barefooted. He was a kind of good-natured giant. No one in the neighborhood could strike an axe as deep into a tree as he could, and few, if any, were equal to him in strength. It takes a powerful man to put a barrel of flour into a wagon without help, and there is not one in a hundred who can lift a barrel of cider off the ground; but it is said that young Lincoln could stoop down, lift a barrel on to his knees, and drink from the hole.
Not long after young Lincoln's return, his father moved to Illinois. It was a two weeks' journey through the woods with ox-teams. Abraham helped his father build a comfortable log cabin; then he and a man named John Hanks split walnut rails, and fenced in fifteen acres of land for a cornfield.
That part of the country had but few settlers, and it was still full of wild beasts. When the men got tired of work and wanted a frolic, they had a grand wolf-hunt. First, a tall pole was set up in a clearing; next, the hunters in the woods formed a great circle of perhaps ten miles in extent. Then they began to move nearer and nearer together, beating the bushes and yelling with all their might. The frightened wolves, deer, and other wild creatures inside of the circle of hunters were driven to the pole in the clearing; there they were shot down in heaps.
Young Lincoln was not much of a hunter, but he always tried to do his part. Yet, after all, he liked the axe better than he did the rifle. He would start off before light in the morning and walk to his work in the woods, five or six miles away. There he would chop steadily all day. The neighbors knew, when they hired him, that he wouldn't sit down on the first log he came to and fall asleep. Once when he needed a new pair of trousers, he made a bargain for them with a Mrs. Nancy Miller. She agreed to make him a certain number of yards of tow cloth, and dye it brown with walnut bark. For every yard she made, Lincoln bound himself to split four hundred good fence-rails for her. In this way he made his axe pay for all his clothes.

Question: Use the TIE strategy (topic, information, express) to explain two central ideas of the textbook entry above. Be sure to include evidence from the text to support the response.