If Abraham Lincoln had leaned back in his rocking chair that night at Ford’s Theatre and turned around—hearing a footfall or a rustle, or glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a stage light glinting off the mouth of the derringer—he would have recognized his murderer. Lincoln loved theatre; in his four years as President, he attended more than a hundred plays. “This is act vee one eye,”he’d whisper to his little son Tad, reading out the Roman numerals on the playbill. And he loved Ford’s: in December, 1863, he’d sat in its Presidential Box for two consecutive nights of “Henry IV”— “pause us till these rebels now afoot / Come underneath the yoke of government”—and that November, ten days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he’d seen John Wilkes Booth perform at Ford’s. “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” little knowing that he was engraving his own Shakespearean epitaph.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.