The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment Myth and MemoryA Lincoln Forum Book(The North's Civil War)

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation. At the end of the Lincoln bicentennial year, and the onset of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the leading scholars of Lincoln and his murder offer in one volume their latest studies and arguments about the assassination, its aftermath, the extraordinary public reaction (which was more complex than has been previously believed), and the iconography that Lincoln's murder and deification inspired. Contributors also offer the most up-to-date accounts of the parallel legal event of the summer of 1865-the relentless pursuit, prosecution, and punishment of the conspirators. Everything from graphic tributes to religious sermons, to spontaneous outbursts on the streets of the nation's cities, to emotional mass-mourning at carefully organized funerals, as well as the imposition of military jurisprudence to try the conspirators, is examined in the light of fresh evidence and insightful analysis. The contributors are among the finest scholars who are studying Lincoln's assassination. All have earned well-deserved reputations for the quality of their research, their thoroughness, their originality, and their writing. In addition to the editors, contributors include Thomas R. Turner, Edward Steers Jr., Michael W. Kauffman, Thomas P. Lowry, Richard E. Sloan, Elizabeth D. Leonard, and Richard Nelson Current.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 1. Lincoln's Deathbed in Art and Memory: The "Rubber Room" Phenomenon Harold Holzer and Frank J. Williams 2. Abraham Lincoln's New York City Funeral Richard E. Sloan 3. Not Everybody Mourned Lincoln's Death Thomas P. Lowry 4. Lincoln's Chief Avenger: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt Elizabeth D. Leonard 5. The Lincoln Assassination in Law and Lore Frank J. Williams 6. Writing History in a Vacuum: The Lincoln Assassination Thomas R. Turner 7. "Let the Stain of Innocent Blood Be Removed from the Land": The Military Trial of the Lincoln Conspirators Edward Steers Jr. 8. Process versus Truth in the Case of the Lincoln Conspiracy Michael W. Kauffman 9. The Martyr and the Myth: The Lincoln Nobody Knows Richard Nelson Current List of Contributors Members of the Lincoln Forum Index

About the Author :
Harold Holzer is Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and one of the nation's leading authorities on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He is chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and has written, co-written, or edited forty-seven books, most recently Lincoln and the Power of the Press. Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy and the author of many books on Civil War and naval history. He won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize in 2005, The Lincoln Prize (with James M. McPherson) in 2009, and the Dudley Knox Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Naval History in 2014.

Review :
The nine essays in The Lincoln Assassination--all of them excellent--explore, in the words of the introduction, 'the legal, cultural, political, and even emotional consequences of the assassination.'-Henry Cohen Unlike other scholars who couch assassin John Wilkes Booth's motivations in the politics of the time (his romanticization of the South and anguish at its perceived oppression), Holzer locates Booth's disenchantment within the bosom of the idiosyncratic, theatrical Booth clan.-Georgette Gouveia Can there possibly be anything new to add to the millions of words already written about Abraham Lincoln's assassination and its aftermath? The answer is a resounding yes, and much of it is contained in this slim but enormously informative and thought-provoking volume. Exploring topics such as the identity of those who kept vigil at the President's deathbed, the joy that some Americans felt when they learned what Booth had done, and the character of the judge who presided over the conspirators' trial, this collection of essays offers welcome - and yes, new - insight into a tragedy whose history-shaping impact remains undiminished after 145 years.-Richard Moe, President