Professor Peter Myers investigates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s concepts of civil disobedience and political action, as well King's thought, as found in his writings and speeches, more generally. Myers examines particularly the objectives King wished to achieve with his work.
This lecture continues from the lecture Martin Luther King, Jr., Part One.
Professor Peter Myers investigates Martin Luther King, Jr.'s concepts of civil disobedience and political action, as well King's thought, as found in his writings and speeches, more generally. This lecture continues in Martin Luther King, Jr., Part Two.
Professor Lucas E. Morel reviews the life and views of Martin Luther King, Jr., focusing on the March on Washington and King's "I Have a Dream" speech. This lecture continues from the lecture Martin Luther King, Jr., Part One.
For the lecture, scroll down to the third seminar of Wednesday, August 4. Readings, available for download, accompany the lecture.
An older version of this lecture can be found here.
Professor Lucas E. Morel reviews the life and views of Martin Luther King, Jr., examining his views of race relations, his religious beliefs, and his definition of civil disobedience, as suggested in his writings and speeches. This lecture continues in the lecture Martin Luther King, Jr., Part Two.
For the lecture, scroll down to the second seminar of Wednesday, August 4. Readings, available for download, accompany the lecture.
An older version of this lecture can be found here.
Why did John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln? What kind of gun did he use?
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth became the first person to assassinate an American president when he shot and killed Abraham Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Using a .44 caliber derringer pistol—a small, easily concealed handgun—Booth fired a single shot (timed so that that the audience’s laughter would mask the report) into Lincoln’s brain at point-blank range before jumping to the stage and escaping into the night. After a two-week manhunt, Federal troops cornered Booth in a barn in Maryland, where a Union soldier shot him in the neck. Booth died two hours later.
A member of a famous acting family (many considered Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, and Booth’s older brother, Edwin is commonly named among the greatest American actors of all time), John Wilkes Booth enjoyed a phenomenally successful stage career during the Civil War: by 1864, he earned $20,000 a year, at a time when the average Northern family earned around $300 annually. A Marylander by birth, Booth was an open Confederate sympathizer during the war. A supporter of slavery, Booth believed that Lincoln was determined to overthrow the Constitution and to destroy his beloved South.
After Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, Booth devised a plan to kidnap the president and spirit him to Richmond, where he could be ransomed for some of the Confederate prisoners languishing in northern jails. Booth enlisted a group of friends from Washington to aid him in his attempt. That winter, Booth and his conspirators plotted a pair of elaborate plans to kidnap the president; the first involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes. Booth ultimately gave up acting to focus on these schemes, and spent more than $10,000 to buy supplies to outfit his band of kidnappers. Neither of the kidnapping plans bore fruit—the second, a ploy on March 17 to capture Lincoln as he traveled in his carriage collapsed when the president changed his itinerary—and several of Booth’s conspirators ultimately left the group.
On the evening of April 11, the president stood on the White House balcony and delivered a speech to a small group gathered on the lawn. Two days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, and after four long years of struggle it had become clear that the Union cause would emerge from the war victorious. Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Three days later Booth made good on his promise. Upon learning that Lincoln and his wife intended to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with commanding general Ulysses S. Grant, Booth used his actor’s connections there to gain access to the president’s box. Finally rejecting the notion of kidnapping, Booth now planned to assassinate the president along with top officials his administration: besides Lincoln and General Grant, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson were to be killed the same night by other members of Booth’s gang. Booth appears to have plotted the murders in the belief that the simultaneous assassination of four top officials would throw the North and the Republican Party into chaos long enough for the Confederacy to reassemble itself.
The other parts of Booth’s plan did not come to fruition. General Grant declined the invitation to see the play; Union officer Henry Rathbone took his place. While Booth waited for his opportunity to assassinate the president at Ford’s Theater, two of his co-conspirators journeyed to their assigned targets. Lewis Powell gained entry to Secretary of State’s home, where a bedridden Seward lay recuperating from a carriage accident; Powell stabbed him several times, but none of the blows was mortal. At the same time, another conspirator, George Azterodt, made his way to the hotel where Vice President Johnson was lodging. Armed with a gun and a knife, Azterodt detoured to the hotel saloon, where he got drunk and lost his nerve. He left the bar without confronting Johnson and discarded his knife in the streets of Washington.
Only one of the four intended victims of Booth’s plot was killed, but Lincoln was by far the biggest prize. With Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency, and the nation lost the one man that most contemporaries, and most American historians, believed best qualified to “bind up the nation’s wounds” after four brutal years of war.
Roger J. Norton, Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination, 2010.
The Abraham Lincoln Association, 2010.
Abraham Lincoln Papers at the library of Congress.
Michael W. Kauffman. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. New York: Random House, 2004.
Lincoln Archives Digital Project
John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, eds. Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler and William A. Link. The South in the History of the Nation, vol. II: From Reconstruction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Currently provides 22 census data samples and 65 million records from 13 federal censuses covering the period 1850-1990. These data "collectively comprise our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population." The project has applied uniform codes to previously published and newly created data samples. Rather than offering data in aggregated tabular form, the site offers data on individuals and households, allowing researchers to tailor tabulations to their specific interests. Includes data on fertility, marriage, immigration, internal migration, work, occupational structure, education, ethnicity, and household composition. Offers extensive documentation on procedures used to transform data and includes 13 links to other census-related sites. A complementary project to provide multiple data samples from every country from the 1960s to 2000 is underway. Currently this international series offers information and interpretive essays on Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, Hungary, and Brazil. Of major importance for those doing serious research in social history, the site will probably be forbidding to novices.
Featuring primarily maps, texts, and images, this gateway site is designed to be a resource for those interested in the history of the greater Cleveland area. The site includes approximately 35 journal articles (from journals such as the Saturday Evening Post) on the history of Cleveland, its newspapers, its railroads and industries, and a few prominent citizens; 36 digitized books; seven manuscript collections (three merely describe the contents of the collection, while four offer digitized resources); an audio file and a video file; two cartoon collections; and nine photograph collections, containing about 600 photographs. Although many of the collections are located on outside websites, visitors can access the collections by subject, date, geographic location, or format.
For educators, the site includes 20 lesson plans, under such categories as American Heritage and Democratic Process. The classroom activities are well-conceived; they feature problem solving and critical thinking exercises like the Mystery Photo Album, in which students attempt to figure out where in the Cleveland area historical photographs were taken, and By the Neck Until Dead, an e-book that details the history of Cuyahoga County, OH, hangings. The site also maintains a list of local history websites.
In conjunction with the Russian State Library in Moscow, the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and the Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, the Library of Congress has digitized more than 2,500 items, comprising approximately 70,000 images, and provided transcriptions and commentaries in English and Russian to offer a comparative history of American and Russian expansion through frontier territories in each nation's continent. The site presents an overview of expansion into Siberia and the American West in six sections: Exploration, Colonization, Development, Alaska, Frontiers and National Identity, and Mutual Perceptions. Each section contains from two to 11 modules that call attention to similarities and differences between the two histories with regard to subjects such as migration—forced and otherwise, missionaries, religious flight, mining, railroads, agriculture, cities, popular culture, and tourism, and even compares Cossacks with cowboys.
The site offers more than 40 complete books, including manuals, handbooks, fiction, and travelers accounts; 77 maps and one atlas; 438 items from the Russian-Ukrainian Pamphlet and Brochure Collection; materials from six complete manuscript collections, regarding exploration, trade, and commercial activities; four tour-of-the-century films; 125 newspaper articles; 11 dime novel covers; five photographic collections; and one sound recording of a Russian folk song. Provides a 500-title bibliography and links to 30 related sites. Valuable for those studying the American West and Russian history and investigating ways to explore frontiers of comparative histories in order to expand beyond limits of national history narratives. Listen to the audio review: .
This project provides a collection of more than 280 digitized materials documenting the history of Florida from pre-contact to the present. It includes materials relating to Florida history, culture, arts, literature, and social sciences in a number of major thematic areas, including Native American and minority populations, exploration and development, tourism, natural environment, and regional interests. These materials are drawn from the archives, special collections, and libraries of the 10 state universities in the Florida system.
Items include family papers, local history books and booklets, diaries, advertising materials, and Civil War letters, business records, maps, and photographs. Many of the materials are regional or local in scope.
The site also includes an extensive (5000-word) Florida history narrative timeline from pre-contact (before 1492) to the present. A user guide and tutorial are provided, and the documents are searchable by county name, keyword, subject, author, or title. The search engine has an option for listing either electronic holdings only or all collection holdings under a particular subject. Entries in the electronic catalog include the archive in which the original is located as well as a 20-word description of the item and its contents.
Note that a few links are still under construction with no completion date indicated. The site is ideal for researching Florida's state and local history.
Designed to document the presence of Belgian immigrants in three Wisconsin counties, this site contains a variety of primary and secondary sources. Legal documents, diaries, letters, photographs, and oral histories are included, totaling some 1,500 resources. The site includes 400 architectural surveys, 54 oral histories (many given in Walloon, a primarily oral French patois spoken by generations of Belgian immigrants to Wisconsin), and approximately 500 pages of Immigration Histories.
The entire collection (with the exception of a few documents that have defied OCR translation) is searchable by keyword and can be browsed. This is a unique collection of primary sources, easily accessed, and usable by students, teachers, or researchers.