Why was Booth admitted into the presidential box?

[loetar44]

Mr. Fazio,

Thank you for your lengthy response. I understand and fully respect that you see history in another way I do. It made me think about the words of our Dutch historian Pieter (Peter) Geyl (1887-1966), who said: “History is an argument without end.” This is one of my favorite quotations because it seems so true. There is no way we can see all sides of history no matter how many different books we read or stories we hear. There is no universally agreed definition of history. I agree with you that history will always have an element of speculation, because history will always be "a construct of the mind" and will always be an interpretation by an individual (from behind a desk) of what occurred. Ask four persons about the same event some hours afterward, and you're likely to get four different recounts of what happened. However it’s my opinion the job of the historian is to cut through the fog of perception and come as close to the truth as possible. That’s why (in my opinion) a historian has to focus on the events. At the most basic level he seeks to answer the question "What exactly happened?", based on what is known from (in the first place) documents. If you, by contrast, fill in gaps with assumptions, probabilities and possibilities, than you can draw other conclusions from the same evidence. In fact (in my opinion) you are than fictionalizing history, not describing the (known) "truth"; in other words writing historical fiction. I realize that both are close relatives and that for a lot of people history is seen as fact, as well as fict. A lot of people will not have any problems with “historicizing fiction” and “fictionalizing history”, but there is a difference. I once read that when we finish reading a history book we think: "So that's what happened!", and when we finish a work of historical fiction we think: "So that's what it (more or less) was like!". The last feeling was mine after reading your chapter 16. We are people, and people are often bound to disagree, because they are people, but that historians who have been trained for many years in historical methods cannot agree on issues of historical interpretation (small disagreements aside) is a riddle for me. I’m not a historian and wonder what Roger have to say in this.

I mentioned the 1980s, because (with no change in evidence) Forbes was never mentioned before and after the 1980s he suddenly was. Do we better understand the events in Ford’s Theatre after 1980, or became it a popular myth after publication of William Hanchett’s “The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies” (1983)?

Kees