Just days after the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. As a fractured nation mourned, a manhunt closed in on his assassin, the twenty-six-year-old actor, John Wilkes Booth.
He was named after his father's favorite president, Abraham Lincon, who, probably not coincidentally, was the subject of the work that made Gutzon's national reputation as a sculptor.
High on a granite cliff in South Dakota's Black Hills tower the huge carved faces of four American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
The boy behind the myth, who in just a few short years transformed himself from a skinny orphan to the most feared man in the West and an enduring icon. Part of The Wild West collection.
Washington is a professor of history at Cornell University. Her most recent book is Sojourner Truth's America. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on June 29, 2009.
Inside the tumultuous 400-year history of the intersection of religion and public life in America — from AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE. This six-hour series examines how religious dissidents helped shape the American concept of religious liberty and the controversial evolution of that ideal in the nation's courts and political arena.
When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, it was seen as an anomly. As such, there were no new safeguards put in place to protect the president from would-be assassins.
How religious ideas and individuals' spiritual experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction era have impacted American social, political and cultural life.
