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.

Our American Cousin is a three-act play written by English playwright Tom Taylor. The play opened in London in 1858 but quickly made its way to the U.S. and premiered at Laura Keene’s Theatre in New York City later that year. It remained popular in the U.S. and England for the next several decades. Its most notable claim to fame, however, is that it was the play U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was watching on April 14, 1865 when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who used his knowledge of the script to shoot Lincoln during a more raucous scene. The play is a classic Victorian farce with a whole range of stereotyped characters, business, and many entrances and exits. The plot features a boorish but honest American cousin who travels to the aristocratic English countryside to claim his inheritance, and then quickly becomes swept up in the family’s affairs. An inevitable rescue of the family’s fortunes and of the various damsels in distress ensues. Our American Cousin was originally written as a farce for an English audience, with the laughs coming mostly at the expense of the naive American character. But after it moved to the U.S. it was eventually recast as a comedy where English caricatures like the pompous Lord Dundreary soon became the primary source of hilarity. This early version, published in 1869, contains fewer of that character’s nonsensical adages, which soon came to be known as “Dundrearyisms,” and for which the play eventually gained much of its popular appeal.

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford’s Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, “Burn the place down!” This is the untold story of Lincoln’s assassination: the forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night, and what each of them witnessed in the chaos-streaked hours before John Wilkes Booth was discovered to be the culprit. In Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, historian Thomas A. Bogar delves into previously unpublished sources to tell the story of Lincoln’s assassination from behind the curtain, and the tale is shocking. Police rounded up and arrested dozens of innocent people, wasting time that allowed the real culprit to get further away. Some closely connected to John Wilkes Booth were not even questioned, while innocent witnesses were relentlessly pursued. Booth was more connected with the production than you might have known—learn how he knew each member of the cast and crew, which was a hotbed of secessionist resentment. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination also tells the story of what happened to each of these witnesses to history, after the investigation was over—how each one lived their lives after seeing one of America’s greatest presidents shot dead without warning. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination is an exquisitely detailed look at this famous event from an entirely new angle. It is must reading for anyone fascinated with the saga of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War era.

For the 150th anniversary, Harold Holzer (The Civil War in 150 Objects) presents an unprecedented firsthand chronicle of one of the most pivotal moments in American history. On April 14, 1865, Good Friday, the Civil War claimed its ultimate sacrifice. President Lincoln Assassinated!! recaptures the dramatic immediacy of Lincoln’s assassination, the hunt for the conspirators and their military trial, and the nation’s mourning for the martyred president. The fateful story is told in more than eighty original documents—eyewitness reports, medical records, trial transcripts, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems—by more than seventy-five participants and observers, including the assassin John Wilkes Booth and Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot him. Courtroom testimony exposes the intricacies of the plot to kill the president; eulogies by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and Benjamin Disraeli and poetry by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Julia Ward Howe give eloquent voice to grief; two emotional speeches by Frederick Douglass—one of them never before published—reveal his evolving perspective on Lincoln’s legacy. Together these voices combine to reveal the full panorama of one the most shocking and tragic events in our history.

Louis J. Weichmann, one of the principal witnesses at the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln, tells the story of the plotting that took place in the boarding house where Weichmann lived.

Think You Know Everything about the Lincoln Assassination? Think Again. After 150 years, many unsolved mysteries and enduring urban legends still surround the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the popular stage actor John Wilkes Booth. In a new look at the case, award-winning history author Robert J. Hutchinson (The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible) explores what we know, and don’t know, about what really happened at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. In addition, he argues that the deep-seated political hatreds that roiled Washington, D.C., in the final weeks of the Civil War are particularly relevant to our own polarized age. Among the tantalizing questions Hutchinson explores are: * Did the Confederacy have a hand in the assassination plot? * Who were Booth’s secret accomplices, and why did he change the plan from kidnapping to assassination? * Why was it so easy for Booth to walk into the president’s box to shoot him? Where were the guards? * How did Booth evade the largest manhunt in U.S. history for nearly two weeks despite being unable to walk? * Who gave the order to shoot Booth in the Garrett barn—and what happened to his body? Drawing upon both primary sources and the best recent historical research, What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination separates established facts from mere conjectures—and is the one book to own if you want to know “what really happened.”

“In this encyclopedia of Lincoln’s assassination, Edward Steers, Jr., the foremost scholar of the assassination, has assembled knowledge of the subject scattered in documents and writings over a period of nearly a century and a half, organized it authoritatively and comprehensively, and written about it clearly.” —William Hanchett, author of Out of the Wilderness: The Life of Abraham Lincoln The definitive A-to-Z reference to the Abraham Lincoln assassination by Edward Steers, author of Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. With a foreword by Manhunt author James L. Swanson.