The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory

In the fourth volume from scholarly collective the Lincoln Forum (following Lincoln Revisited), 10 contributors turn their attention to the 16th president's assassination. Editors Holzer and Williams collaborate on an interesting (and well-illustrated) look at popular engravings and prints portraying Lincoln's final hours, some of which put a crowd of 50 at Lincoln's deathbed, in a room large enough for no more than a half-dozen. Richard Sloan looks at Lincoln's funeral procession and his time lying in state in New York City, with interesting insight for amateur urban historians. Thomas Lowry's ""Not Everybody Mourned Lincoln's Death"" is vivid but narrow, focusing on the easily-grasped point that many Americans, on the heels of the Civil War, were glad to see Lincoln dead. Multiple articles look at the trial of John Wilkes Booth's conspirators, often disagreeing about which of the accused, convicted and hanged were actually guilty. Thomas R. Turner notes that as early as the 1860s, ""historians were agonizing that... there was little left to be said"" about Lincoln; while this collection does reinforce that idea, it also turns up enough unanswered or undecided questions to hold readers' interest and promise more scholarship to come. B&w illus.