this -- volunteer in a historical society and know of a diary or interested in doing the research to find diaries or newspapers or items from that time. you can find out what the responses like in your community. we want to know. we are eager for this map to be covered with representations. david: in fact on our website we have a webpage for submitting an item. it's a very simple form. fill it out, tell us about it, and then i will get in touch with you. i check that e-mail bucks frequently. i will get in touch and ask you some more information, and then we will ask you or the historical society or whoever has this item about getting into remembering lincoln. we can fill in this map and really have this represent the

country and even the world. announcer: american artifacts takes you to museums and historical places to learn what artifacts reveal about american history. now we visited the museum and washington dc to view an exhibit to mark the 150th anniversary of lincoln's assassination. the new york herald special editions published on april 14 and 15, 1860 five show how the news unfolded after the first associated press report that the president had been shot. carrie: i and the curator and director of collections here at the museum. and we are in our new lincoln exhibit called president lincoln's dead. this exhibit has a tight focus on seven editions of the new york herald which was the most widely circulated newspaper at the time that were published in the 18 hours immediately

following lincoln's assassination. it is the minute by minute story of the news as it happened about the assassination of lincoln. one of the ways that we hope people understand not just time but place is through this great map on the floor in the center of the gallery. because we are almost in this building at the epicenter of things. the museum is on the site of the national hotel which is the hotel where booth stated before he committed the horrible crime. you can take a look on the floor of this room after you read through the newspapers and place

yourself in all the different spots that are being referenced -- the national hotel, the ford theater, the peterson house which is where lincoln was taken after he was shot across the street from ford's theater. it is the spot where he ultimately died. to the telegraph offices and newspaper row. so you can place yourself in all these significant spots that are part of the story. the very first edition is the 2:00 a.m. edition, the regular edition of the "new york herald", the morning paper at that time. it covered essentially, it is the breaking news. it uses the paper because at that time went a surprise, silent attack on someone.

it did not necessarily mean something that resulted in death. so the first paper, while you may see the word assassination just reports the shooting. as well as some other tidbits of information. it reports that stewart had been attacked as well. it gives you the first blush of what had gone on that evening. the second edition is a 3:00 a.m. edition, an hour later. you can see how swiftly the "new york herald" is working to get information to people. the second edition, the main thing, the new information it reveals is that they have identified john wilkes booth as the assassin. the next edition is an 8:45 a.m. edition, and it is the first to announce the death of the president. this comes out 90 minutes after the death. so that is really fast. you know that the telegraph

wires were on fire between washington and new york to get that kind of information out and around. then to get it into the newspaper. one of the exciting things for us and for lincoln scholars everywhere is that this was an edition that was previously unrecorded to modern historians. so it is a paper we have had in our collection for a long time. but we just sort of uncovered its significance during the course of doing research that was helping lead us to creating this exhibit. so it has long been thought there were six editions of the "new york herald," and historians and scholars believed that for decades. but we were able to unearth this from our own collections and bring it to the forefront for the public and researchers and scholars and historians. the next edition is a 10:00 a.m. edition.

it is interesting for a couple of reasons. first, it is the first one to have what are called the morning borders. you can see the lines between the different columns of text are wider than they are in all of the prior editions. and that is a function of the printing that was done specifically to signify that the country was in mourning for a reason. m-o-u-r-n-i-n-g. not a.m. it was the first to reveal that it was a plot, a conspiracy. he was not just a whim on part of john wilkes booth that evening. that he was in cahoots with others to pull off this assassination. the fifth one is another 10:00 a.m. edition. we refer to the editions by the last dateline, the last

time stamped piece of information in it. so it is still 10:00 a.m. but we refer to it as the 10:00 a.m. reward edition because it includes information about the reward being offered for the capture of booth and the conspirators. at this point in time, it is offered at $10,000, a significant amount of money at this point in time. as we move through the manhunt for all these people and subsequent days, that reward offer increases to $100,000. our next edition comes in the afternoon at 2:00 p.m., and it is interesting from one standpoint because this is a point in time where the breaking news moves to the back page of the newspaper. so, the front page, they left at the same.

then they started loading in news on to the back page. so the way print is happening at that point in time is that every letter is being laid one by one. so it is not lines of type. it is not you and your computer. it is every single letter being laid into the chase, which is what they call the big form that holds all the printing materials. so at a certain point, the front page is full. they can't jam anymore news. there is nothing insignificant left on the front page. nothing. so they have flipped and they've moved. now breaking news is happening on the back page. you don't see the big banner. you see a small back page notification. oddly enough, i think this is the one where they have not managed to change the date. it still says the 14th on the

back page, but it is the 15th. they just have not gotten that tidbit changed. but the big news that is revealed to us in the 2:00 p.m. edition is that the vice president has been sworn in as the president. the country has a new president. the country as a whole has a new president and it is lincoln's successor. there has been a peaceful transfer of power. it is one of the unique things that we depend on in this country. it was a coup that happened. there was not a wrestling for power with the south. nothing. it was the simple transfer of power peacefully to the next in line. there's still one more edition that the "new york herald" publishes on this day. it is the 3:30 edition and it

announces information about funeral preparations. although that is happening pretty swiftly. but the most striking thing it reports is that booth had been captured, which in fact is not true, because booth is not captured for another 11 days. he is on the lam. and he has successfully evading authorities for a good bit of time. so, it has false reports in it as well. there were self-report -- false reports that secretary of state stewart had been assassinated. they do that throughout. so this last one has that, a false report. many of the reports in these newspapers come from the ap, the associated press, which we still have today. and it was established in 1846 a conglomerate of five newspapers pooling resources. the herald being one of them.

they wanted to make sure that they got as much information from around the country as they possibly could. and it really rises to importance during the civil war. you can see it is at the apex of its early significance here. so, reporter named lawrence gobright is actually the ap correspondent in washington and he is doing most of the reporting. so, much of the original reporting has come from him. then through the ap and into the herald. also, you see stanton, who is the secretary of war, giving his official dispatches. and they are recounted in the paper as well. so stanton would go to the war telegraph office and dispense information officially coming from the government. and then the newspapers would report that as well. i can't purport to know precisely what people's reactions were, not being there, but certainly there are report

and subsequent editions of frenzy and despair. this was a much beloved figure leader, in parts of this country. and so, there were certainly a bit of worry and mayhem. in addition to that, because of other reports that the secretary of state had been killed when he , was not killed -- he was severely injured. there was uncertainty as to whether this was an attack on this nation from an act of terrorism, a foreign attack, was it some greater plot that was going to result in murder of other individuals in the government? it was unclear, especially just coming off the civil war what exactly this all meant. so, certainly there was this hunger among the citizenry to get as much information as they possibly could. and "the herald" was working to supply that.

you will see that things are very similar from edition to edition. in the far left column of each paper, you see it starts with important and followed by a series of text. it's very much the same or changes slightly over the course of the edition and the new information gets loaded in. column by column, with little things they feel they can sacrifice or they have gotten new updated information about and new text is loaded in. it is a very physical process. we think of this now as the characters, you have to put them in one by one. that is not what is happening here. you can see spots where there might be a column that starts with a big headline. you never see a banner headline, which i think is fascinating.

you do not see anything running across five columns. something like lincoln is dead. which, of course, 100 years later, you see with president kennedy. those are banner headlines all over. you got to almost look inside to get more details. but that is not what is happening. technology is not at that spot for banner headlines to run across multiple columns. in the 2:00 p.m. edition, we also get some reports that "the herald" has taken from other newspapers. so they have relied heavily on the ap, lawrence gobright. the official dispatches from stanton, secretary of war. those are heavily relied on. as we keep moving to the day they look to other sources. they look to, i think there are reports from the evening "post"

and the "daily chronicle" which are local d.c. papers. they are obviously also reporting wildly on this. where we get reports of the crime scene, which is some interesting information that comes out of "the chronicle." then we get the notes from the doctor at the bedside, which "the herald" gets from the "washington evening star." not in a malicious way. maybe not overly collaborative but certainly it was with , permission. the report from the chronicle, "the star," so the information is getting out because that is seen as the most critical thing. in the final edition, we get some reports of not just mourning, which we know is going

on, but people celebrating. it was still -- the civil war was over but there were still divisiveness within the nation. and not just among the conspirators and booth. there were others who were apparently perfectly happy to see the end of lincoln. there were reports of arrests of people celebrating the death. and there are reports that say things like, all happy here from louisiana. that sort of thing. so, those are interesting little elements that we don't see, with the newspapers as your primary source, you get more than you can get in the broader strokes of a history book. it is nice to be able to let people reading it for themselves. there were suddenly other newspapers who were publishing and certainly doing additional

editions, doing extras, but the "herald" seems to have held the high water mark for that kind of activity, partly because they had the fastest presses, the most up-to-date. they had a huge number of pressmen, more than any other newspaper that we see recorded. they have a large squadron of reporters. they had many resources at their fingertips to be able to make that happen. the "new york herald" is the most widely replicated -- maybe not reproduced -- but replicated newspaper reporting lincoln's death. so, there are editions that were made as commemorative pieces in the years after the assassination. they come out and are sold at

the time not to fake anybody out. they are so just as commemorative pieces. everybody knows at the time who what they are getting a compilation of the news from " , new york herald" on this day. none of them specifically replicate any of the front pages you will see in this exhibit but they utilize that news and the typeface and the information of that era. like if he went to the gift shop at the museum and you bought it, it would look old timey, but you would be fully or where you're not buying a copy of the constitution. in the intervening 130 years people have come to believe as they are passed down within families, that what they have is an actual "new york herald" that reports the news of lincoln's assassination. in most instances, that is not the case. one of the way we can tell the difference between the replica

and the actual papers is that even in the 15 years after the assassination, paper changed a lot. and these papers that are part of the exhibit, part of the originals, were printed on paper with a high cotton content and a very low wood pulp content. as we progress into the 1890's, and there is much more demand for the penny press, and there is much more hotly contested many more newspapers, and the industry is a lot more hotly contested and everybody is trying to save as much money as they can, they move in the direction of using paper that has a high would pulp content and a low cotton content. that high wood pulp content make the paper age rapidly. a paper from the 1880's are in the worst condition we find in our collection as a whole.

in the museum's collection from the 1490's to present day. so the 1880's are the worst of it where the wood pulp content is high and they are as old as dirt. they are beginning to crumble and yellow and they are brittle and they are sometimes really hard to salvage. the papers here still have that nice high rag cotton content. they look good. they do not age in the same way. the acid content is lower. that is what is the case with your newspaper today. it's very acidic and it has the capacity to age rapidly. you let your papers hang around for a couple months and they are already yellowing. it is the same with the papers in the 1880's. six of the seven editions are

from the museum's permanent collection. in the course of research and being in touch with scholars to run across a collector who had the edition we did not have. it was a known edition, reviewed by scholars and part of the historic record, but we did not happen to have one. and that is the 3:30 edition. we were able to in the index end the exhibit just as the "new york herald" ended it, thanks to a loan from a collector of the 3:30 edition. few the course of the seven editions that cover the 18 hours immediately following the shooting, it carries you through those hours so that you understand the key strokes of history which we fully comprehend today but with much , more nuanced detail along the way, that there was a trip to

the theater. there was the shooting, the death, a new president was installed, and funeral preparations were in order. one of the things that i hope people comprehend as they move through the exhibit is that they get the understanding of how people at the time were getting their news. they were getting minute by minute updates. this is really a moment in time where everything had come together. you can see how this was unfolding for a confused and scared nation, many of whom were coming off of a jubilant victory. some of whom were coming away from a crushing defeat. but how they got this information about the assassination and how it was conveyed to them and understood. in addition, we want people to understand the significance of the speed of news at this moment in time.

news moves incredibly fast nowadays, so quickly between twitter and all of the electronic media but this is , really a moment in time where everything has come together. the complete proliferation of the telegraph. there was still this incredible squadron of reporters coming off the war. the capacity of the "new york herald" to move so swiftly with a number of pressman they had and the speed of their presses to be able to push this much news out this rapidly. and for it to come to people in that way. so those are among the things we want people to be able to take away from this exhibit. we give them a chance also to take a little stock of where they are in this city and consider that many of these things happened right here right here in this town. and almost right here in this

neighborhood which is also really exciting for us. our exhibit opened on february 13 of this year, just right before presidents' day. and it will run through the early part of next january january 10 of 2016. so there is a good while to see it. to the best of our knowledge this is the first time all seven editions of "the herald" have been together since they were printed. 150 years ago. of course that sesquicentennial anniversary of the assassination is the reason for the timing of this exhibit. lincoln always fascinates people to this day, but this year in particular is important because it marks the 150 anniversary of his assassination, the first president in our history to be assassinated. it is a really important marking time.

announcer: you can watch this and other american artifacts programs anytime by visiting our website. announcer: on april 13, 1865, the day before his assassination, abraham lincoln left the white house on or spec for washington dc this would be his last ride to the cottage before he was shot by john wilkes booth. this past monday they posted a horseback recession -- procession. this is about 15 minutes. [no audio]