Something about John Wilkes Booth you may not know...

[L Verge]

Boy, I'm going to have to change my sleeping schedule - the good things on this forum go on after 10 pm.

One point (and Rob, you probably know that I'm on Bill's and Joe's side here), I think Booth made his motives pretty clear in the To Whom It May Concern letter and also his exaggerated (but fairly accurate) writings in the "diary."

Jim, I have the same opinion as you that a majority of the American public knows very little about Lincoln and/or the assassination. With the younger generations, you can thank standardized testing for that because the push to get reading, science, and math scores up, history and the social sciences in general have taken a hit.

You can also thank the textbook publishers who don't even give decent lip service to the history that us old-timers studied (and continue to do so). I am also concerned that we are nearly half-way through the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and there has been very little done on a national scale to bring the history to life for the general public.

I was teaching during the Centennial celebration, and there was a great deal of attention played to it. I am very weak in the field of military strategy, etc. However, there were board games produced during that observance that my 8th grade boys devoured. I would be up to all hours of the night boning up on key battles of the Civil War so that I could hold my own in class the next day! Are there any recently released video games on the Civil War?

Finally, one last rambling thought on how Booth is viewed: Not too long after James O. Hall and I became the best of friends, he said to me that he wondered if most of the bad press about Booth actually got started in the South as the defeated Confederates wanted to distance themselves from the assassination. We certainly see that "blame the other guy" used effectively in politics today as well as attempts to slander someone we don't want to be associated with anymore.