It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged
actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre,
escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met
his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria
that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those
were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic
elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more
fascinating.
Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost
Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a
deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of
the Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of
archival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on the
background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his
plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of
the conspirators.
Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects common
misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind Booth’s
plan to unseat Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous
autocrat, “an American Caesar.” In preparing his study, Kauffman
spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth’s
house, and re-created key parts of Booth’s escape. Thanks to
Kauffman’s discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of
this defining event in our nation’s history, and they will come to
see how public sentiment about Booth at the time of the
assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his
actions and motives next to impossible–until now.
In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of
literature on the Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and
oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Kauffman finally
makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to
this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times
controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed
event in American history.
From the Hardcover edition.
關於作者：
MICHAEL W. KAUFFMAN is a political historian and graduate of
the University of Virginia who has studied the Lincoln
assassination for more than thirty years. He has appeared on
AE, the History Channel, C-SPAN, and the Learning Channel, and
was called to testify as an expert witness in the 1995 Booth
exhumation hearings. He lives in southern Maryland.
From the Hardcover edition.
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