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America's Original Sin - White Supremacy, John Wilkes Booth, and the Lincoln Assassination (Hardcover)
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America's Original Sin - White Supremacy, John Wilkes Booth, and the Lincoln Assassination (Hardcover)
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Finally, a compelling narrative history of the Lincoln
assassination that refuses to ignore John Wilkes Booth's
motivation: his growing, obsessive commitment to white supremacy.
On April 14, 1865, after nearly a year of conspiring, John Wilkes
Booth shot Abraham Lincoln as the president watched a production of
Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the next
morning. Twelve days later, Booth himself was fatally shot by a
Union soldier after an extensive manhunt. The basic outline of this
story is well known even to schoolchildren; what has been obscured
is Booth's motivation for the act, which remains widely
misunderstood nearly 160 years after the shot from his pocket
pistol echoed through the crowded theater. In this riveting new
book, John Rhodehamel argues that Booth's primary motivation for
his heinous crime was a growing commitment to white supremacy. In
alternating chapters, America's Original Sin shows how, as
Lincoln's commitment to emancipation and racial equality grew, so
too did Booth's rage and hatred for Lincoln, whom he referred to as
"King Abraham Africanus the First." Examining Booth's early life in
Maryland, Rhodehamel traces the evolution of his racial hatred from
his youthful embrace of white supremacy through to his final act of
murder. Along the way, he considers and discards other potential
motivations for Booth's act, such as mental illness or persistent
drunkenness, which are all, Rhodehamel writes, either insufficient
to explain Booth's actions or were excuses made after the fact by
those who sympathized with him. Focusing on how white supremacy
brought about the Civil War and, later, betrayed the conflict's
emancipationist legacy, Rhodehamel's masterful narrative makes this
old story seem new again. The first book to explicitly name white
supremacy as the motivation for Lincoln's assassination, America's
Original Sin is an important and eloquent look at one of the most
notorious episodes in American history.
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