The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory,Harold Holzer Craig L. Symonds, Frank J. Williams, editors, Fordham University Press, 256 pp., $27.95.
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.
Harold Holzer, Senior Vice President for External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the nation’s leading authorities on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He serves as co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He has written, co-written, or edited 35 books.
Craig L. Symonds is a leading Civil War historian who was Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy for three decades. He is the author of more than ten books, including Lincoln and His Admirals, which won the 2009 Lincoln Prize.
Frank J. Williams, a renowned Lincoln scholar, is a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and author or editor of many books, including Judging Lincoln.
"Here is an informative and provocative collection of essays about Lincoln’s assassination and the place it occupies in American history and culture. The authors are not only in full command of their special approaches to the subject, but they fully command our interest and respect, as well. This is a must.”
—William Hanchett, author of The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies and the documentary Black Easter
CWL will trust William Hancett on this one. His The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies is after thirty years still the best review of the conpiracy theories that accused Sectretary of War Henry Stanton and, yes, even the Pope.
Text Source: Fordham University Press