A 12-page handwritten manuscript of former US president Abraham Lincoln's last address has sold at auction for nearly $3.1 million.
The figure is a world auction record for an US historical document.
Lincoln delivered the address, which begins: "We meet this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart," from a window of the White House on April 11th, 1865, three days before he was shot.
The manuscript had been expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2 million. The old record was $1.5 million for another Lincoln document.
A typed letter from Albert Einstein telling former US president Franklin D Roosevelt the atom bomb could be developed sold for nearly $2.1 million. Einstein's August 1939 letter was behind Roosevelt's decision to launch the secret Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the first atomic bomb.
The items, part of a collection amassed by Malcolm Forbes, the late publisher of Forbesmagazine, were sold to anonymous telephone bidders.
AP