[snippy_about_it]

You are so right. I remember trying to memorize dates and names for history classes. Seems that was all the tests were about.

My mother is an avid reader (even today at 79 with a magnifying glass and partially blind). She also has strong conservative values.

As a toddler, any free time was spent at the library and I was taught to look things up and to do independent research from the moment I could read. I only lived with my mother until about the age of eight but I was fortunate to have her instill reading, curiosity and daydreaming in me at a young age so it stuck! A gift to last a lifetime.

[Samwise]

Cheers to your mom!

[xJones]

This is a wonderfully detailed account of everyone connected to the Lincoln assasination. If your'e not a professional historian, snippy, you should be.

I've been to Ford's Theater National Historical Site and it's really interesting. We always buy books, literature, in the National Parks bookstores, but there wasn't anything there as comprehensively put together as this. I bought books there and didn't learn nearly as much.

One of those prisoner masks was on display in the Ford's Theater Museum. No wonder Paine was "traumatized", it scared the fire out of me. And I have no sympathy for Paine, the account in the link you gave about his attack in the Seward house was vicious. His gun misfired when he aimed at Frederick Seward's head, and then he went to pistol-whipping, knife-slashing and stabbing. If his gun hadn't misfired at the start, he probably would have killed several, instead of leaving five wounded who recovered.

John Surratt certainly made out like a bandit; fleeing to Canada, then Europe and finally tried in 1867 after the hysteria had died down. He walked after his wife had swung from a rope.

Lincoln's bodyguard, John Parker of the Metropolitan Police Force, had left his post.

Don't you know, it must have been rough to live with that? And it hadn't been clear to me that if all the designated victims had been killed, the U.S. government would have been thrown into chaos as to swearing in a new president, and who knows have that would have come out.

Excellent account, and is a list of the Foxhole threads posted somewhere?

[w_over_w]

Morning Glory Snip & Sam~

Interesting read . . . I never knew about the multiple assassination plots. As I looked at the portraits of the different conspirators I couldn't help but see Al Franken, Tim Robinson, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen . . . etc. The parallels of hatred.