Lincoln's Waffle Shop

And other unvetted recommendations

This week I’m celebrating three months of posting on The Silent Sod! It feels like it’s been longer than that, and at the same time, like I’m just starting out. I have a lengthy list of post ideas, thousands of flower photos still to share, a new Silent Sod series dropping this week written by my sister, Char, and right now, a bubbling font of inspiration, which feels great. As always, I appreciate your comments, replies, suggestions, and shares, which keep me motivated and make this online space one where we can reflect on important questions about death, memory, and meaning.

Another month means another round up post, and this month, I wanted to focus on something that’s been crossing my radar a lot recently: President Lincoln’s assassination. I visited Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was shot, in February and since then, I’ve been encountering related stuff at a volume that feels suspicious but may be attributable to frequency illusion.

Typically, when I make recommendations, I like to have thoroughly vetted them, but I’ll admit I haven’t had the chance yet to check all of these out, so if you have thoughts on anything, feel free to share.

Listen

• I’ve mentioned on here before that much of my history knowledge comes from listening to Great Courses lectures as I fall asleep at night. Earlier this year, I started the course The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us and ran across a lecture title that shocked me: The Lincoln Assassination Conspiracy Trial. While I feel like I’ve always known that John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, the idea that it was a conspiracy and others were involved came as a surprise. Did you know there was another man assigned to kill Vice President Johnson, but he lost his nerve? And another guy who went into the home of the Secretary of State William Seward and seriously injured him? Here is a breakdown of the different players involved.

• Right now, my night listening largely consists of episodes of The Bowery Boys, a podcast about New York City history. I discovered the podcast in January during my visit to NYC, but I’ve been bingeing so hard, I’ve already come across this episode from 2016 about the famous Gilded Age actor Edwin Booth, who was John Wilkes Booth’s brother.

Watch

• So the Listen recommendations I shared above I’ve only half paid attention to because I fell asleep while listening to them. For my Watch recommendation, I’m going even further out on a limb and sharing something I haven’t seen anything more than the trailer for, Apple TV+’s Manhunt, a miniseries about the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth in the wake of the assassination. If I ever sign up for Apple TV+ again, this show is at the top of my list.

Visit

• Since the theme of this post is half researched recommendations, I also want to suggest a visit to Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth is buried in an unmarked grave on his family’s lot. I visited the cemetery in 2019 with the intention of seeing Booth’s burial spot, but then I arrived late and had to sign in as a visitor at the cemetery office, which was unusual, so I didn’t have time to search Booth out. The cemetery was cool otherwise, though.

• Okay, this recommendation I can give wholeheartedly even though I also arrived kind of late in the day and had to hustle. My visits to the National Park Service’s Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was shot, and the Petersen House across the street, where he died the next morning, were very informative. I especially appreciated how they interrogated what’s appropriate in a memorial space:

  • Should the gun that shot Lincoln be displayed or not? (It is now but hasn’t always been.)

  • Should Ford’s Theatre continue to be used for theatrical productions even though a national tragedy occurred there? (Little Shop of Horrors is currently on stage but for many years the building did not operate as a theater.)

Read

• May I suggest something from this tower of books about Lincoln on display at the museum connected to the Petersen House? Not sure how many are in the tower, but the accompanying sign says there have been over 15,000 books written about Lincoln. The only non-fiction book I can recall reading about Lincoln was Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, which I remember enjoying.

Eat

• I arrived too late in the day to eat at Lincoln’s Waffle Shop, a restaurant near Ford’s Theater. It currently has over four stars on Google reviews, and they offer breakfast all day long.

  

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