So it is Thursday, September 19th at 10.40 a.m. What are we going to be talking about today?

All right, Roman, why don't we start out easy? Here's a question.

Who's on the five dollar bill?

Abraham Lincoln's on the five dollar bill. Abraham Lincoln's on the five dollar bill.

That's right and for most of our lives it's been a particular engraving of Lincoln looking

to the right in a three-quarter profile since 2007 the five dollar bill has a different

portrait of Lincoln but the engraving on the older version of the bill is based

on a photograph taken by Anthony Berger in February of 1864 and that photograph

enjoyed another life besides ending up on American currency.

Sometime in the late 1860s, a printmaker named William Pate produced a well-known engraving of Lincoln.

And in it, Lincoln is standing, looking to the left, with his right hand holding a black shawl and there's an American flag leaning in the background.

Lincoln's left hand is resting upon a table topped with papers and on the papers you can see the words Constitution,

Union, and proclamation of freedom. It's a very dignified portrait and it's a fake.

Pate created this portrait of Lincoln by taking Berger's photograph of Lincoln, the one in the old $5 bill, and flipping it so he looks to the left.

And then putting that head onto another body and that body it came from a

portrait of John C. Calhoun was a southern politician and a national figure who was famously pro-slavery.

Yeah.

And in fact, the original engraving with Calhoun's own head

has the papers on the table saying something else.

They don't say Constitution, Union, and Proclamation of Freedom.

They say strict Constitution, free trade, and the sovereignty of the states.

The Lincoln engraving tells us that the practice of doctoring photos, including pictures of the president, isn't new.

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