If you’ve seen “Lincoln,” you’ve marveled at Thaddeus Stevens, an abolitionist congressman who gets some of the movie’s best lines and who was played by Tommy Lee Jones. Well, I was scanning the letters section of the LA Times last weekend when I saw a letter by Beverly Wilson Palmer regarding the movie, identifying her as 1) a Claremont resident and 2) editor of “The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens.”

And so it was that a couple of days later, I was interviewing her by phone. No time like Oscars week, right? Stevens and Palmer are the subjects of my Friday column.