abraham lincoln

Chris Knight's avatar

It’s stuff like this that never ceases to fascinate me.  These things impress upon us that so much of our history… isn’t that long ago after all.

Luke Martin, Jr. passed away a few days ago in Raleigh (that’s the capital of North Carolina for those who might not know that).  Mr. Martin was 97.

He died 179 years after his father was born.  His father, by the way, was a former slave who escaped to freedom and then fought in the Civil War as a soldier in the Union army.

Fox News has more about the life of Luke Martin, Jr. and his father.

It wasn’t all that uncommon for soldiers on both sides of the conflict to, long years later, marry much younger women.  A lot of it was because of the considerable pensions that soldiers received.  But the general consensus is that there was never a lack ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Good friend “lowbridge” informed me about this a few years ago, so I’ve got to credit him with the find. It’s a story that’s gained renewed interest because of a certain upcoming movie.

So who was Samuel Seymour? He was the last surviving witness of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

And Mr. Seymour lived long enough to talk about it on national television (sharing a stage with Lucille Ball, among others).

From February 9 1956, here is Samuel Seymour’s appearance on I’ve Got a Secret:

Pause for a moment, and consider: Samuel Seymour was five years old when he heard the gunshot in Ford’s Theater and saw John Wilkes Booth jump down to the stage after shooting Lincoln in the back of the head. Seymour was 96 when he passed away two months after being on I’ve Got a Secret.

No doubt there are many still ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

You know him as Lincoln the Rail-Splitter, Lincoln the Lawyer, and Lincoln the President of the United States.

Now, bestselling historical author Seth Grahame-Smith has uncovered the true story of Lincoln… the Vampire Slayer.

Behold the trailer for the book!

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter should be in bookstores everywhere about now, and will almost certainly become required reading in history classrooms across the country....

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Chris Knight's avatar

Found a curious item on the CharlotteObserver.com site about Bostic: a small town an hour’s drive west of Charlotte here in North Carolina. Longstanding local folklore has it that Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin atop what is now a tree-covered hill in this Rutherford County community, and not in Kentucky as the history books say. There is even the Bostic Lincoln Center: a small museum dedicated to the legend (which is not without its own supposed body of evidence). Either of the links will tell you more about the allegation, which is rife with all sorts of old-fashioned nineteenth-century ribaldry!

Hmmmm… fascinating, on numerous levels. I’m not saying that I do believe there’s an iota of credence to the claim though (which Geoff Elliott of The Abraham Lincoln Blog describes as “bad history” and calls the Bostic Lincoln Center “one of the worst examples I’ve yet seen”)....

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Chris Knight's avatar

What I would give to have a brain gifted enough to handle stuff like math and software coding (and I’ve tried folks, believe you me). ‘Cuz then I could maybe work for a company like Bethesda Game Studios, who not only are very talented at making video games like Fallout 3, but also have a twisted sense of humor.

So I’ve been working my Fallout 3 character through the Capital Wasteland, 200 years after the nuclear exchange between the United States and China. Just levellin’ him up more or less. Well tonight I wound up in the ruins of Arlington National Cemetery…

Out of curiosity I went looking for Arlington House, which was the pre-Civil War home of Robert E. Lee and his family. It wasn’t hard to spot and I gotta give serious props to the Bethesda staff for including such a nice historical location…

Guess ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

HBO’s John Adams miniseries has left me still feeling both floored and haunted. If only everything else on television could be so powerful…

Ever since Sunday night when the finale ran, my interest in real American history (as opposed to the fake pageantry of, say, the current election cycle) has been stoked. Not that it ever went away or anything, but I guess that after becoming so cynical about what America is turning into, I felt a need to look back at what we used to be, and what we could still be again.

So one thing led to another and I found myself looking for the earliest photographs of Presidents that we know are in existence. I wasn’t expecting to find any of John Adams (photography was invented the year he passed away and it would be some time before the process was perfected) but I did find this ...

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