Academic literature on the topic 'Booth, john wilkes, 1838-1865'

In 1865 while Whitman was preparing Drum-Taps for publication in New York, John Wilkes Booth fatally wounded Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington. As the nation expressed its grief in public mourning, poems, sermons, speeches, and funeral parades, Whitman paid close attention to the country's bewilderment and the “strange mixture of horror, fury, [and] tenderness” that followed the “black, black, black” of Lincoln's death. Although some volumes of Drum-Taps were bound and distributed, Whitman apparently realized that his new book needed a companion collection about Lincoln's death and the war's end. Postponing the release of Drum-Taps, Whitman began work on “a little book” (p. 23), a collection of eighteen poems titled Sequel to Drum-Taps (Since the Preceding Came from the Press). When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd. And Other Pieces. More than any other group of poems by Whitman, Lilacs and Other Pieces is a response to a moment in history; this immediacy of relation to historical discourses and events makes the volume an uncommonly suggestive example of Whitman's dialogue with his culture.

ABSTRACTEdwin Jesse De Haven (1816–1865) led the first Grinnell expedition in search of the lost British explorer Sir John Franklin in 1850–1851. Since it was the ship's charismatic surgeon, Elisha Kent Kane, who wrote the popular account of the voyage, De Haven's achievements have generally been overlooked. De Haven joined the United States Navy when he was 13 and was master on the ill-fated Peacock during the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842) to the Antarctic under Charles Wilkes. He saw action in the Mexican War in 1848, and was serving under Matthew Fontaine Maury at the Naval Observatory when he was chosen to take command of the first United States Franklin search expedition. He retired from the navy at the age of 46 and died three years later.

This article is a critical input to the national and international debate on Gun Control and the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution since 1791. Auspiciously, the paper interrogates the historical, ideological, and socio-cultural roots of the Gun Rights from Medieval Europe to modern America as well as its implications for homeland security in 21st Century American society. The whole legalistic, philosophical and socio-cultural rationale for and against the Gun Control Question in mainstream American politics elicits many questions: Why has it been legislatively infeasible to address the frailties inherent in the 2nd Amendment texts? Is the Second Amendment immutable amid post-1791 realities? Has morality lost its place in American politics? Was the rights prescribed under 2nd Amendment vested on the individuals as construed impliedly or on the people as expressly stipulated in the constitution? And why has America with the most sophisticated military and intelligence architecture in the world failed to demonstrate the capability to contain sectarian killings in the land? The paper submits that the Gun Control Debate lays bare, one of the internal cleavages within the American political and social system, a nation so admired not just by her military, economic and diplomatic clout but also by the valued she stresses and defend world over: freedom, justice, equality and global peace, ideals for which the United States supplanted pax-Britanica for Pax-Americana. The appalling antecedents of gun killings in America knows no rank with 11 presidential assassination attempts for which four American presidents died: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881); William McKinley (1901) John F Kennedy (1963) with Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan seriously injured in the 1912 and 1981 assassination attempts. The quartet presidential assassins: John Wilkes Booth; Charles J. Guiteau; Leon Czolgosz and Lee Harvey Oswald were all some of the first high profile abusers of the 2nd Amendment and the gun rights it granted. The death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X among many also resonates one of the foundational flaws of a nation globally reputed as the policeman of the earth. When will this trend ever end?.Millions have gone yet there seems to be hyper-partisanship about the Gun Control Question. This political cleavage represents a failure of the present generation of the political elites, the people and the American institutions to rise above and repeal the frailty of the 2nd Amendment, couched in one of the most nebulous languages in constitutional framings since the first ten Amendment to the world’s first-ever written constitution was ratified on 15 December 1791.The lessons from the government response to the Gun Question never placed America as a society developing societies should aspire to become, it is totally antithetical to the admirable values known about the greatest nation since the collapse of Nazism, Fascism and in the last decade of the 20th Century Communism for which in the submissions of Francis Fukuyama, Liberal Democracy became the Last Man metaphorically outlasting all other contending ideological contemporaries thus: “The End History”. The moral, spiritual, political leaders of America must converge on one front on the Gun Question, the Republicans must not hide under conservative garb and watch the blood of innocent generation of Americans been wasted by abusers of the Second Amendment. The appropriate measures to put a permanent lid on the mindless gun-related deaths must be carried out. The Democrats must forge a bipartisan consensus to arrest the moral drift in the land under the guise of the 2nd Amendment’s immutability clause: “shall not be infringed upon”. American political leaders must not under whatever guise send the wrong signal to the international community that will characterize the state as a policeman that cannot police his home, Charity begins at home, it is contradictory, antithetical and undermined every value upon which America prides herself under the rubric Pax-Americana. Historical antecedents show that the National Rifle Association is a shadow of itself, haven being skewed from its original goal to promote martial qualities and marksmanship to a lobbyist group without conscience for humanity. The American Institutions must live up to their mandate to tame the sinister and overbearing influence of the group. To the political leaders of the land the patriots of the 1775 Revolution fought for a land of the free it is your bounden duty to ensure their labor never be in vain: Lincoln was conscious of this during the heady days as was Andrew John who put their differences aside to restore national psyche, President Trump must not trade the blood of the children of America with his 2020 presidential re-election ambition as the NRA pro-Trump for 2020 billboards suggests. The Gun-Control debates further lays bare one of the antinomies of American Conservatism “being pro-life, anti-abortion and at the same time, pro-gun” as the abuses and defense of the 2nd Amendment represent one of the Ideological conspiracies against under the garb of Classical Liberalism propagated by contemporary votaries of American conservatism.

Abstract On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play from the Presidential Box at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. There is still controversy concerning the findings of Lincoln's autopsy. The physicians that attended the autopsy documented that the bullet entered the left occipital region of the brain, but opinions differ as to the path the bullet took through the brain. The official autopsy report documented that the bullet traveled through the left brain and did not cross the midline. Others who watched the autopsy claimed that the bullet entered on the left side of the president's brain, crossed the midline, and ended up just above the orbit on the right. In this manuscript, we reviewed all of the statements of the witnesses to the assassination in an effort to reconstruct the approach that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, took through the Presidential Box as he approached the president. In addition, we conducted an on-site analysis of the shape and dimensions of the Presidential Box at Ford's Theatre to support the approach that Booth took. Based on this forensic analysis, we provide supportive evidence that the findings of the official autopsy report are accurate; that is, the bullet that entered the president's left brain stayed on the left and did not cross the midline.

‘Vengeance, April–December 1865’ begins with the death of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865, after being shot by the Southerner, John Wilkes Booth, and the swearing in of Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, as the seventeenth president. Johnson promised to deal harshly with the guilty Confederacy, but how this was to be translated into policy was another question. Reconstruction of the Union would require dealing with a thorny hedge of legal, constitutional, and political questions. Initially, Johnson had to concentrate his attention on ending the war. His early hard line was soon replaced with a softened approach to the Southern states, much to the anger of the Republicans of the North.

On Friday, April 14, 1865, five days after the South surrendered, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in Washington. The president died the following day. New York—even though most of its citizens had not voted for Lincoln in either presidential election—started to grieve. When Walt Whitman walked up Broadway, he noted how, “All Broadway is black with mourning—the facades of the houses are festooned with black—great flags with wide heavy fringes of dead black, give a pensive effect—toward noon the sky darkened & it began to rain.”...

Abstract When General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, the event seemed to confirm the universe of “form and union and plan” that Whitman had celebrated in “Song of Myself.” “And could it really be, then?” he said of the Union victory, “Out of all the affairs of this world of woe and failure and disorder, was there really come the confirm’d, unerring sign of plan, like a shaft of pure light-of rightful rule-of God?” (PW,II, 503). This apparent sign of an unerring plan was once again thrown into question when only a few days later on April 14, Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. The assassination negated the prospect of “rightful rule,” suggesting that “woe and failure and disorder” were in-deed the only “confirm’d” plan of the world. In his second inaugural address, delivered a month before his death, Lincoln had urged a spirit of national reconciliation: “With malice to-ward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, -to do all which may achieve and