Download or read book Summary of Terry Alford s In the Houses of Their Dead written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-08-08T22:59:00Z with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The minister found indifference, worldliness, and bigotry in Louisville. He thought that this was some practical joke being played on the greenest Yankee in the slaveholding city. But, no. Booth was deeply affected. #2 Junius Brutus Booth, an actor, immigrated to the United States in 1821 with his companion Mary Ann Holmes. They had ten children, including Edwin and John Wilkes. Their lives were destroyed by their father’s alcoholism and mental illness. #3 After the death of his children, Junius became extremely depressed. He blamed his manager, Thomas Hamblin, for eating pork, and he challenged him to a duel. #4 Edwin was born on the night of November 13, 1833. The Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833 occurred over his head, and some thought that those born with it were divinely favored.
Download or read book In the Houses of Their Dead The Lincolns the Booths and the Spirits written by Terry Alford and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Here is Lincoln in the Bardo—for real. You couldn’t make it up—necromancers, mad actors, frauds, true believers, and, in the middle, the greatest President.” —Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln The story of Abraham Lincoln as it has never been told before: through the strange, even otherworldly, points of contact between his family and that of the man who killed him, John Wilkes Booth. In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet—and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning—in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president’s fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in “blood writing” whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients, John Wilkes Booth. Alford’s expansive, richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Booths—from patriarch Julius, a famous actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that despite the progress of the age—the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more—death remained ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times, In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation.
Download or read book Prince Among Slaves written by Terry Alford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An educated, aristocratic slave, Abd Rahman Ibrahima was overseer of the large cotton and tobacco plantation of his master. After more than twenty-five years, when he was finally freed, sixty-six-year-old Ibrahima sailed for Africa with his wife, two sons, and several grandchildren, and died there of fever just five months after his arrival. Prince Among Slaves is the first full account of Ibrahima's life, pieced together from first-person accounts and historical documents. It is not only a remarkable story, but the story of a remarkable man, who endured the humiliation of slavery without ever losing his dignity or his hope for freedom.
Download or read book In the Houses of Their Dead written by Terry Alford and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet—and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning—in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president’s fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in “blood writing” whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients, John Wilkes Booth. Alford’s expansive, richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Booths—from patriarch Julius, a famous actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that despite the progress of the age—the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more—death remained ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times, In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation.
Download or read book John Wilkes Booth written by Asia Booth Clarke and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features a biographical sketch of the American actor John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865). Notes that Booth shot and killed the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.
Download or read book Fortune s Fool written by Terry Alford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, his friends were stunned--not only by the murder but by the thought that someone they knew as fantastically gifted, successful and kind-hearted could commit such a crime. Fortune's Fool, the first biography of Booth ever written, is the life story of this talented and troubling individual.
Download or read book My Thoughts Be Bloody written by Nora Titone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian Nora Titone takes a fresh look at the strange and startling history of the Booth brothers, answering the question of why one became the nineteenth-century’s brightest, most beloved star, and the other became the most notorious assassin in American history. The scene of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation. My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’s older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln’s assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country’s most notorious assassin. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincoln’s assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided family—and nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.
Download or read book All the Single Ladies written by Rebecca Traister and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-10-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a 'dramatic reversal.' [This book presents a] portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman, covering class, race, [and] sexual orientation, and filled with ... anecdotes from ... contemporary and historical figures"--
Download or read book A Muslim American Slave written by Omar Ibn Said and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Download or read book America s Original Sin written by John Rhodehamel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to explicitly name white supremacy as the motivation for Lincoln's assassination, America's Original Sin is an important and eloquent look at one of the most notorious episodes in American history.
Download or read book Prominent Families of New York written by Lyman Horace Weeks and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book They Have Killed Papa Dead written by Anthony S. Pitch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The assassination of Abraham Lincoln is a central drama of the American experience. Its impact is felt to this day, and the basic story is known to all. Anthony Pitch?s thrilling account of the Lincoln conspiracy and its aftermath transcends the mere facts of that awful night during which dashing actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the head and would-be assassin Lewis Payne butchered Secretary of State William Seward in the bed of his own home. ?They Have Killed Papa Dead!? transports the reader to one of the most breathtaking moments in history, and reveals much about the stories, passions, and times of those who shaped this great tragedy. Virtually every word of Anthony Pitch?s account is based on primary source material: quotes from previously unpublished documents, diaries, letters, and journals. With an unwavering fidelity to historical accuracy, Pitch provides confirmation of threats against the president-elect?s life as he traveled to Washington by train for his first inauguration, and a vivid personal account of John Wilkes Booth being physically restrained from approaching Lincoln at his second inauguration. Perhaps most chillingly, details come to light about conditions in the special prison where the civilian conspirators accused of participating in the Lincoln assassination endured tortuous conditions in extreme isolation and deprivation, hooded and shackled, before and even during their military trial. Pitch masterfully synthesizes the findings of his prodigious research into a tight, gripping narrative that adds important insights to our national story.
Download or read book Blood on the Moon written by Edward Steers and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-10-21 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.
Download or read book The Afterlife in Popular Culture written by Kevin O'Neill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-06-17 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture. What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing. This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Download or read book London s Triumph written by Stephen Alford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic story of the dazzling growth of London in the sixteenth century. For most, England in the sixteenth century was the era of the Tudors, from Henry VII and VIII to Elizabeth I. But as their dramas played out at court, England was being transformed economically by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. At the start of the century, England was hardly involved in the wider world and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened, which placed London at the center of the world stage forever. Stephen Alford's evocative, original new book uses the same skills that made his widely-praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world--trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible--the families, the guild members, the money-men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic, and desirable--are as interesting as any of those at court. Their ambitions fueled a new view of the world--initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which still resonate today.
Download or read book The Lodger written by Marie Belloc Lowndes and published by Standard Ebooks. This book was released on 2022-04-30T17:06:09Z with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lodger is the first known novelization of the Jack the Ripper story. It follows the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, a maid and butler. An eccentric lodger, Mr. Sleuth, arrives at their lodging-house just as a wave of horrific murders begins to sweep London. The Buntings become engrossed in the newspaper sensationalism as well the detailed accounts of their young friend, a Scotland Yard detective. Lowndes first wrote The Lodger as a short story published in McClure’s Magazine, then later published the novelization in the Daily Telegraph as a serial. It was very successful, with over a million copies sold within a few decades. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein praised it, with one contemporary reviewer calling it “the best novel about murder written by any living author.” It has since been adapted to other media, notably as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s first movies. Today the novel is still considered the best fictional adaptation of the Jack the Ripper legend. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Download or read book The Wheel Spins written by Ethel Lina White and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-11-13 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wheel Spins is the novel about young and bright Iris Carr, who is on her way back to England after spending a holiday somewhere in the Balkans. After she is left alone by her friends, Iris catches the train for Trieste and finds company in Miss Froy, chatty elderly English woman. When she wakes up from a short nap, she discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is on the verge of her nerves. She is helped by a young English traveler, and the two proceed to search the train for clues to the old woman's disappearance. Ethel Lina White (1876-1944) was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins, on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, was based.
