[2010-12-16 12:00:00] How did family jealousy culminate in the assassination of one of America's greatest presidents? We'll find out this hour with historian Nora Titone, whose new book is "My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy" (Free Press, 2010).
[If] it seems that the acting profession has never been filled with more vile representations of the human race, one particularly atrocious case has generally escaped popular memory. Because 145 years ago, an actor who was the Steven Segal of his day shot the president of the United States in the back of the head and killed him, for no greater reason, author Nora Titone posits in her recently released first book "My Thoughts Be Bloody," than that he was jealous of an older brother. Even before Abraham Lincoln's assassination at the hands of hack actor John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, writes Titone (who attended Castilleja School in Palo Alto from 1986 to 1990), actors were considered to be of the same class as prostitutes and thieves. Patrons flocked to theaters to forget the brutality of the ongoing Civil War for a short time, but when, for example, it was discovered that Lincoln's head had rested in actress Laura Keene's lap as a doctor removed bullet fragments, she was called a jezebel, was shunned for the rest of her acting career and, deeply in debt, died from a tubercular hemorrhage.
We frequently hear the term “values” discussed with regard to American politics, culture and life. But what are "American values?" All week, we’re delving into this question. Yesterday we discussed home ownership. Today we wrap up our series with a look at freedom. How did freedom come to be an American Value? If we value freedom so much, why have we spent so much of our nation’s history enslaving our own people, or oppressing those in other nations? And what does Freedom mean to Americans today? Joining us is Gene Clem, president of the Southwest Michigan Tea Party Patriots, who shares what freedom means to him, along with Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, and author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln” and “American Slavery: The Story of American Freedom.”
The Washington Post had this to say about the Foner's book:
What gives the book its major spurt of energy and freshness is its account of the complicated political and social context in which Lincoln's views on slavery were formed and the large number of people and movements that helped create the dominant attitudes toward slavery in early and mid-19th-century America. The book "is intended to be both less and more than another biography," Foner claims in his preface. Actually, it's not a biography at all. It is different from a biography, and consequently neither "less" nor "more."
The telling of history is a monumental task and responsibility that all historians hold sacred. Historian Thomas C. Holt has gained prominence as the one of the foremost respected historians of American and African-American History. Holt says in his new book, "Children of Fire: A History of Afircan Americans," he tried to build the history around a number of critical historical figures, begining with a 17th century slave who managed to gain freedom from slavery all the way through to the 21st century. He says the common thread throughout the book is following individulas who belonged and claimed their belonging in America.
, 
, 
, 
. Many of the token African American Republicans, mistakenly point to Lincoln as their inspiration for joining the GOP. But here's the problem, Foner notes that the GOP "could not be more different. Lincoln in 1860 did not receive a single vote in most of the southern states. His Republican party was the party of opposition to the expansion of slavery and later of emancipation, and a strong federal government protecting the civil and political rights of black Americans. Today the party's center of gravity is in the South, it opposes most federal initiatives (except defense) and is the inheritor of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" aimed almost exclusively at white voters."