Fanny Seward
Fanny Seward

Author: Trudy Krisher

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2015-01-06

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 081565295X

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On April 14, 1865, the night of President Lincoln’s assassination, Booth’s conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward in his home just blocks from Ford’s Theatre. The attack, which left Seward and his son seriously wounded, is recounted in poignant detail in Fanny Seward’s diary. Fanny, the beloved only daughter of Seward, was a keen observer, and her diary entries from 1858 to 1866 are the foundation of Krisher’s vivid portrait of the young girl who was an eyewitness to one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Fanny offers intimate observations on the politicians, generals, and artists of the time. She tells of attending dinner parties, visiting troops, and going to the theater, often alongside President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary. Through Fanny’s writings, Krisher not only skillfully brings to life the events and activities of a progressive political family but also illuminates the day-to-day drama of the war. Giving readers a previously unseen glimpse into the era, Fanny Seward: A Life broadens our understanding of Civil War America.

Seward
Seward

Author: Walter Stahr

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 1439121184

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From one of our most acclaimed new biographers--the first full life of the leader of Lincoln's "Team of Rivals"--William Henry Seward, one of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century.

Team of Rivals
Team of Rivals

Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2006-12-08

Total Pages: 945

ISBN-13: 1416549838

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One of the most influential books of the past fifty years, Team of Rivals is Pulitzer Prize–winning author and esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political foes. Winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inspiration for the Oscar Award winning–film Lincoln, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, directed by Steven Spielberg, and written by Tony Kushner. On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war. We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through. This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

Blood on the Moon
Blood on the Moon

Author: Edward Steers

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2005-10-21

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780813191515

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Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.

Chasing Lincoln's Killer
Chasing Lincoln's Killer

Author: James L. Swanson

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0545495806

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NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author James Swanson delivers a riveting account of the chase for Abraham Lincoln's assassin. Based on rare archival material, obscure trial manuscripts, and interviews with relatives of the conspirators and the manhunters, CHASING LINCOLN'S KILLER is a fast-paced thriller about the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth: a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia.

Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades
Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades

Author: Susannah Ural

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-10-20

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1472806727

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Filled with diverse letters and diary entries from the archives and rich resources across America, Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades sheds new light on the military events, politics, and personal sacrifices experienced during the War Between the States. For four years American families on both sides of the Mason–Dixon Line were forced to endure the violence and hardship of the Civil War. This is the story of these families, expertly crafted from their own words. Revealing the innermost thoughts of both famous citizens and men and women forgotten by history, esteemed Civil War historian Susannah J. Ural explores life on the battlefield and the home front, capturing the astonishing perseverance of the men and women caught up in this most brutal of conflicts.

Age of Assassins
Age of Assassins

Author: Michael Newton

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 704

ISBN-13: 0571290469

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These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did. The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'. Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon. In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.

Wide Awake
Wide Awake

Author: Jon Grinspan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-05-14

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1639730656

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“Excellent."--Wall Street Journal A propulsive account of our history's most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war. At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. To some, it demonstrated the power of a rising majority to push back against slavery. To others, it looked like a paramilitary force training to invade the South. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there. In this gripping narrative, Smithsonian historian Jon Grinspan examines how exactly our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. Perfect for readers of Lincoln on the Verge and TheField of Blood, Wide Awake bears witness to the power of protest, the fight for majority rule, and the defense of free speech. At its core, Wide Awake illuminates a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.

Beware the People Weeping
Beware the People Weeping

Author: Thomas Reed Turner

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1991-09-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780807117224

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The first killing of a president in American history, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln shook the nation to its foundations with grief and rage. With one bullet the brief period of good feeling at the end of the Civil War was over. By 1867 the initial belief that the Confederate leadership had engineered the assassination had given way to speculation that Andrew Johnson had been behind the conspiracy. This was followed by bitter attacks on the military trial and on the defense of its two most prominent “victims,” Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd. Most recently, there have been attempts to show that it was the radical faction of Lincoln’s own party that arranged his death. In Beware the People Weeping, Thomas Reed Turner pushes away the elaborate conspiracy theories that have always surrounded Lincoln’s death and uncovers exactly what can be known about the murder and its aftermath. Finding that many historians have worked in ignorance of the context of the events, or distorted the evidence to suit their own ideas about political assassination, Turner looks instead to public opinion of the time—as reflected in newspapers, diaries, letters, sermons, and transcripts of the pretrial investigation and the trial itself—to understand how and why the public and the military reacted as they did. Probing the aftermath of the assassination, Turner tells of the spontaneous outpouring of rage and despair, the reaction in the defeated South, the almost universal conviction that the South was behind the plot, the actions of the authorities in tracking the conspirators, and the trials of the suspects, including that of John Surratt in 1867. A close look at these confused events and an untangling of the controversies that arose in their wake, Beware the People Weeping strips away more than a century of speculation to retell with hard facts the history of Abraham Lincoln’s death.

Acting in the Night
Acting in the Night

Author: Alexander Nemerov

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0520947444

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What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov’s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening’s performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.