Lincoln’s Final Hours 2022 Events
Sunday, October 2 at 2 p.m. for The Forgotten Women of the Lincoln Assassination talk with archival photos or 1 p.m. for a house tour followed by the 2 p.m. talk
Visit the boyhood home of John Wilkes Booth for a presentation about the forgotten women of the Lincoln Assassination.
I will show archival photos from private collections and from my book Lincoln’s Final Hours and dish on five of the 10 women from my next Lincoln book:
–Clara Harris Rathbone was sitting eight feet from President Lincoln when he was shot. She attended the play with the president and Mrs. Lincoln and with her fiance, who was also her step-brother.
–Elizabeth Keckley, an enslaved mother who bought her own freedom and that of her son, counted the first ladies of the North and the South as her dressmaking clients.
–Mary Lincoln owed $27,000 to New York dress shops , the equivalent of $416,000 today, but she didn’t tell her husband. Whenever the president saw her in one of her low-cut gowns, his face lit up.
–Lucy Lambert Hale Chandler, an abolitionist senator’s daughter, was John Wilkes Booth’s secret fiancé. She vowed she would marry him, even at the foot of the scaffold.
— Laura Keene wasn’t just the woman who held President Lincoln’s head in her lap on assassination night. She opened her own theater on Broadway. She offered a $1000 playwright’s prize for the best American play. She and her daughter’s ran a literary magazine.
She tried to create a theater circuit and Vaudeville was based on her model. And she had a brief workplace affairs with Edwin Booth, the actor-brother of the assassin.
Admission to the 2 p.m. talk is $5 cash for those 13 and older. The fee supports the Junius B. Booth Society, a volunteer group that aids in the restoration and preservation of Tudor Hall, the home of Junius Booth and Edwin Booth, two of America’s most renowned 19th Century Shakespearean actors. Admission includes a tour of the house and grounds at 1 p.m.
The Booth family’s 1840s country home is one hour southwest of Wilmington, Delaware.
The historic Gothic Revival cottage was built by carpenters from historic Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
For more information: Call 443 619 0008 or go to http://spiritsoftudorhall.blogspot.com
True Crime Philadelphia 2022 Events
Monday, October 17 at 6:30 p.m. for a discussion of historic crime in Philadelphia — from America’s first kidnapping in 1874 in Germantown to the notorious Lillian Reis trial with a defendant so sexy she was once arrested for lewdness for doing the twist fully clothed.
The discussion and archival photos from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and Temple University’s archives is scheduled at 6:30 p.m. at Springfield Township Public Library in the lower level program room. Registration is required at www.springfieldtwplib.org/events
Monday, October 24 at 7 p.m. for a discussion of historic crime in Philadelphia — from America’s first kidnapping in 1874 in Germantown to the notorious Lillian Reis trial with a defendant so sexy she was once arrested for lewdness for doing the twist fully clothed.
The discussion and archival photos from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and Temple University’s archives is scheduled at 7 p.m. at the Indian Valley Public Library, 100 E. Church Avenue, Telford, Pa.
Web Page: https://www.ivpl.org/
Phone: 215-723-9109
Wednesday, November 2 at 6:30 p.m. at Silver Lake Nature Center, an event sponsored by Margaret R. Grundy Memorial Library, 680 Radcliffe Street, Bristol, Pa. A discussion of historic crime in Philadelphia.
More information to come.