History for Cocktail Parties' hack historians James Ottley and Thornton Kennedy wrap their three-part series on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln with a look at the events inside Ford’s Theatre, the near-fatal attack on William Seward, and John Wilkes Booth’s dramatic escape. The hosts question whether Booth could really have sprinted from the theater and mounted his horse so quickly with a broken left fibula, an injury he claimed to have suffered when leaping from the president’s box to the stage during Our American Cousin. They explore how intimately Booth knew the theater, his time spent in the saloon next door, and the troubling dereliction of duty by Lincoln’s bodyguard that may have enabled the cowardly murder. The episode closes by reflecting on Ford’s Theatre as a place forever marked by tragedy and historical weight, while setting the stage for the next series on Booth’s 12-day flight from justice.
