Sidney Blumenthal's volume 2

[Wild Bill]

I agree with Jerry here.

Fancy writing often conceals what really happened in the past. As such, Blumenthal seems to use his "wry humor" to avoid seeing the times in which Lincoln lived, as the nineteenth century German historian Leopold Von Ranke put it, "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," that is, as they actually were, in favor of making them fit some modern political interpretation. Nineteenth century Americans did not see their political problems from the perspective of twenty-first century historians. When we try to make them do so, we shift from history to propaganda. There is an awful lot of that, both in and out of the Surratt Society, and especially on the topic of Lincoln, one suspects.