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 theconspirators, 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.