The Center for an Informed America

In just a little over a year – in what will be an historic 150-year anniversary – the American people, and likely people all around the world, will come together in remembrance of the man who was once rather preposterously described by a biographer as “the most...

I know what you must be thinking here: “How the hell could you leave Francis Tumblety out of the previous post? Compared to him, guys like Boston Corbett, Henry Rathbone and Edwin Stanton seem perfectly sane. And whose name was in the news in a weirder way in the...

Anyone notice anything peculiar about the two images of Lewis Powell in my last post? Anything at all? Other than, of course, the fact that one of them had been colorized, making it appear unsettlingly contemporary? Because they are, to be sure, very unusual images....

In the last installment, we met the seven men and one woman who faced trial by military tribunal for their alleged roles in the plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. But there were two others involved in the supposed conspiracy: the mastermind and assassin,...

Defense attorney Joseph H. Bradley, whom we met in the last installment, had this to say to the jury and spectators at John Surratt’s trial: “Who was John Wilkes Booth? … He was a man of polished exterior, pleasing address, highly respectable in every regard, received...

“The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, only days after the end of the war, was a terrible tragedy. Much has been speculated about the events leading up to the murder and immediately afterward, but few people know what really happened.” So says Bill O’Reilly...

According to the official story, Powell came calling at the Seward home the night of April 14 under the guise of delivering medicine for the ailing William Seward. He was greeted by houseboy Bell, whom he allegedly brushed past while insisting that he was to...

 In my continuing quest to gain some kind of understanding of exactly what happened on the night of April 14, 1865, I have worked my way through several more rather tedious treatments of the Lincoln assassination, including a relatively new tome by Leonard Guttridge...

If there is anything we can be certain about in regards to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, it is that we will never know what really happened in the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre at approximately 10:15 PM on the night of April 14, 1865. In...

It should be noted here that it has never made any sense at all why John Wilkes Booth would have chosen Ford’s Theatre as the ideal site to assassinate the president. As eyewitness Edwin Bates noted the day after the shooting, “the probability was that the man when...

When we left off on the last outing, two men officially identified as John Wilkes Booth and David Herold had just crossed the Navy Yard Bridge from Washington, DC into Maryland. They were the only two people to cross the bridge after curfew that fateful night, so...

Before resuming where we left off, I need to tack on some info here that should have been included in earlier installments. First off, there were, as it turns out, at least three additional suspicious deaths that followed closely on the heels of the Lincoln...