Eventful first week of 2018. All that and more, on tonights pbs newshour. Major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by moving our economy for 160 years. Bnsf, the engine that connects us. Babbel. A language app that teaches reallife conversations in a new language, like spanish, french, german, italian, and more. Babbels 1015 minute lessons are available as an app, or online. More information on babbel. Com. Funding provided in part by 20th century fox. The post, in theaters everywhere january 12. The ford foundation. Working with visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide. And with the ongoing support of these institutions and friends of the newshour. This program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Woodruff President Trump faces new revelations tonight about whether he tried to obstruct an investigation of alleged russian ties to his campaign. Both the New Yor
How Political Parties have used the memory of lincoln. Let me introduce our next speaker. Michael kauffman is one of the leading historians of the lincoln assassination. He is author of american brutus John Wilkes Booth and lincoln conspiracies, which was named by the New York Times and the Washington Post as one of the best nonfiction books of 2004. There are copies of the paperback version on the Registration Table that you can purchase after our program is concluded. His other works include in the footsteps of an assassin and a modern edition of memoirs of a lincoln conspirator. His bus tours of the John Wilkes Booth escape route have been popular for many years. He has lectured throughout the country, appeared on Many Television documentaries. Civil war historian william c. Davis, jack davis, once wrote no one has studied booth longer or in more depth than michael w. Kauffman, a wellknown voice of reason in the field of assassination studies. Today, Michael Kauffman will talk to us
Lunch, got in his car shut the door locked it, cranked up before he pulled off someone was pounding on drivers side window, and mr. East looked and there was a very scary looking individual saying, are you p. D. East, the troublemaking newspaper man . [laughter] and with more courage than he felt, mr. East said is, yes, i am. The man said if you get out of this car, ill beat your brains out. Mr. East, said, if you want me to get out of this car, youve got to give me a lot more incentive than that. [laughter] the regard i have for the Virginia Historical society where, where i spent many, many weeks working on this book for nelson, for graham, for the wonderful work here thats all the incentive i needed to come. And, again, i thank you for the invitation. The book grew actually from a class i taught on great crimes. And in that class we would take a different crime every week the lindbergh kidnapping, haymarket riot the next week, then the lincoln assassination. Hands down the lincoln a
Background, the context is the theater. This was an act that occurred in a theater, by an actor, with other actors standing by. And i wanted to look at it through the eyes of those people. And when i was working on the president s book and i was working on the lincoln chapters, i kept coming across this iconic playbill for our american cousin. I looked at it and i kept thinking, these are real people most of whose names have been lost. I mean, if you asked people on the street who the people were involved with the lincoln assassination, certainly people know lincoln, they know booth, maybe 1 in 10,000 would know laura keene. But almost no one would know the names john dyott, harry hawk, billy withers. These were major names in the events of that night. So i started looking even closer to get a sense of, who were these people . I began to find in some cases their names were spelled wrong or the names were a misrepresentation. In some cases its really difficult tracking down actors, beca
Unable to reup in the theater in the aftermath of the tragedy and there was public outrage at the thought of continuing it as a theater. So they would basically be forced to sell the building to the War Department under stanton , who we have to thank otherwise the building would have been lost to history. For many years, the War Department utilized the theater as a Storage Facility for its war records. It wasnt until the latter part of the 19th century, early 20th century, that it became under the office of public buildings and grounds. When the National Park service acquire the structure, that is the year the agency went from just nature parks over to historical, cultural sites under franklin roosevelt. For many years, it was in area of the theater, a Lincoln Museum covering artifacts of lincolns life, his legacy. In the 1960s from 196419 68 it was restored back to its 1865 appearances you see it today. The official first play reopened on lincolns birthday, february 12, 1968. As you a