After his assassination in 1865, Abraham Lincoln was laid to rest in Springfield, Illinois. Most people know the story of Lincoln's murder as it shocked the nation after the Civil War. However, Lincoln's body was nearly stolen not once but twice, and this is the true story of that crime. I enjoyed Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James Swanson and was looking forward to a narrative nonfiction book like it. This was not as fast-paced as Chasing Lincoln's Killer, but it does pick up when it gets to the actual crime. The motive for the crime was important but seemed to take up a lot of the story. It was interesting to learn about the problems with counterfeiting in Civil War America and the start of the Secret Service, but the story of the actual crime was the major highlight of the book. If you are willing to stick it out, you will be rewarded with an interesting slice of history.
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On April 26, 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan leaves home to collect her paycheck at the National Pencil Company and never returns. The next morning, her body is found strangled at the basement of the pencil factory, and entire town is changed in the events that follow her death. Several men are accused, and one, Leo Frank, is found guilty. There is certainly evidence that he did it, but there is also evidence pointing to the major witness in the trial, Jim Conley. Governor Slaton decides to commute Frank's sentence from death to life in prison. The uproar in the community, led by Tom Watson, leads to the lynching of Leo Frank. When I started teaching Georgia history last year, I began to read this more complete account of the Leo Frank case. There is so much that happened in this case, and no way to explain it in the short amount of time we have in class. There were witnesses who told one story and then said another, leading many to be nearly convicted of perjury. There were cries of racism on both sides, anti-Semitism for the Jewish Frank and prejudice against the African-American Jim Conley. Even today when you look on the comments for Leo Frank material, there is still dispute over whether Leo Frank was innocent. This is not an easy read, and it took me six months to finish it. But if you read any of it, you will realize there is a lot more to this case from the newspapers (including the New York Times), to the detectives, to the lawyers (one, William Smith, who turned on his own client), to the lynching (which including former governors), to the jury that investigated the lynching (which included members of the lynching party). It was the one thing everyone wanted in World War II. The bomb. Not only would countries work against their enemies, but sometimes against their "allies." Germany, the United States, and Russia race to create the world's deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb.
This is where the truth is stranger than fiction. The spying part of the story was much more interesting than how the bomb was created, though both were fascinating. It makes one shiver when you think how close we came to not winning the war and the decisions that were made to end the war. Were we right in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That's a question we still ask today as other countries, like Iran and North Korea, race for their own nuclear weapons. We wonder what have we unleashed, but at the same time, if we had not bombed first, would someone |
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