By Jen Simone ’18 and Nicole Hindley ’18
In the second entry in our new series, “Letters from the Battlefield,” Jen Simone ’18 shares a letter from George Washington Beidelman, a Union soldier of the II Corps, written on July 4, 1863 from the Gettysburg battlefield. By July 4th, Beidelman knew that the Union had won a decisive victory… but he got a few facts wrong, even telling his father that General James Longstreet had been captured. Video produced by Nicole Hindley ’18.
By Jen Simone ’18 and Nicole Hindley ’18
In our newest series, “Letters from the Battlefield,” Jen Simone ’18 shares a letter from Henry Robinson Berkeley, a Confederate artilleryman, written on July 2, 1863 from the Gettysburg battlefield. In his letter, Berkeley expresses the horror of finding a line of 79 men North Carolina cut down by a single volley of musketry. Video produced by Nicole Hindley ’18.
On an April night in 1865, John Wilkes Booth became the most notorious actor of the nineteenth century. However, he is not remembered in history because of his ability to capture the hearts of an audience. In fact, rumors have spread throughout the years that he was not even that great of an actor. He is remembered only as the villain who shot and killed President Lincoln, on the night of April 15, 1865. It is because of the crime he committed that Booth acquired his infamous reputation of the 19th century. Many actors of the Civil War era, including Booth’s own brother, have been overshadowed by the memory of John Wilkes Booth.
Edwin Booth is the less famous Booth in modern memory, but back in the nineteenth century Edwin was a superstar. He tackled the hardest Shakespeare roles, playing Macbeth in Macbeth and Hamlet in Hamlet. In fact, his production of Hamlet was so popular that it played for one hundred performances at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. According theatre scholar Richard Sautter, this was highly unusual for its time. A majority of the time shows played for a night, a couple of days, or even a week, but so many performances was rare at the time. Julia Ward Howe, wrote in her diary how she was impressed with Booth’s performance of Hamlet, “Saw Booth in ‘Hamlet’ — still first-rate, I think, although he has played it one hundred nights in New York.” Continue reading “The Other Booth: The Cult Following of John Wilkes’s Brother”
