in case you didn't get enough of it in the first post ~

[lookingland]

here's the other book i finished reading this afternoon for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 30 ~ Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Reed Turner. this book has some interesting stuff in it and is better written than the previous one. it also focuses on public opinion during the subsequent trials, etc. it doesn't go terribly in depth, but provides some nice tidbits (one little piece of dirt on Gen. Holt has given me a great idea for a scene). the writer spends a lot of time dismissing other historians, which i find bothersome, and doing other irksome things like defending stanton and making excuses for the military tribunal, etc. on the one hand, he makes some good arguments and provides a nice counterpoint. on the other, he's living in a fantasy that says "well the Union was imprisoning people and torturing them without legal recourse anyway, so the conspirators were no special case". hmmmm. in turner's world two wrongs apparently make a right!

still and all, a fun jaunt. a little yankee-bent, but otherwise worth the read.

this is the chair lincoln was sitting in when he was shot.
contrary to popular belief, the stain on the headrest is not
blood ~ it's hair oil from the ushers at the theatre.
it's doubtful that much of the blood in the box was lincoln's.
most of it came from major rathbone, who had been stabbed.

Comments

[xstitchfla.livejournal.com]

That chair used to be at the Henry Ford Museum up at Greenfield Village in Dearborn MI. I used to see it as a child and us kids didn't care that you told us it was hair oil - we all had to believe it was blood!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

hahahahahaha ~ ! you're bound to see what you want to see!

there's an interesting project going on at the field museum in Chicago (which also owns some bits and pieces from Ford's) where they're trying to identify the blood on mrs. lincoln's cloak, do dna testing, etc. they're looking for potential descendants from the lincoln line (the last known one died in 1985, i think).

: D

[xstitchfla.livejournal.com]

Wow that is really cool. I find it so amazing what can be done in this day and age and then have it applied to things that happened long ago!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

the dna stuff sorta weirds me out ~ i mean, what happens when we isolate the genes for this, that, and the other, and then people start digging dead people up to test them?

there's some icky implications in there (leastways i think so). if i were a science-fiction writer, this is the sort of thing i would write about.

: D

[sparowe]

Your info says a lot about my schooling. I never knew that someone had been stabbed at the same time; just heard that Lincoln had been shot.

...and having read more about him, all I can really say is, how sad!

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

somebody wrote a book reacently (called Clara, i think) about the rathbones.

what a sad sad end.

: o (