martha hode, with you, first.u think about the legacy all that came afterwards from the war, you were looking at personal stories, right, in your work? did you see things already that kind of stayed as themes through time even up to our own time? >> yes. what i found was at the moment lincoln's assassination, those hours, days and weeks right afterwards, which is a time people haven't explored deeply and that's the reading i did in all these personal source, those responses fortold clashing visions of the nation's future, and we see the legacies of that today. >> brown: it was there already. >> it was there already right from the start. >> brown: what kind of clashes were most obvious from the start? >> well, the question of black freedom was very very important. so african americans and their white allies wanted more than freedom. they wanted equality. they wanted suffrage. they wanted land and education, and they wanted that with federal enforcement. the former confederates wanted their own political rights back

please welcome professor martha hodes. [ applause ] >> good afternoon. i'm happy to be part of this event. i've been teaching the civil war for nearly 25 years. i call my course race, civil war and reconstruction. i want to draw my students about larger historical questions. i've always had a few lines in my lecture about the assassination, but several years ago i found myself taking a greater interest in this event. i now trace that interest to september 11th 2001. that tuesday was the first day of the fall semester at new york university. the first plane hit the towers before i left my apartment and the second as i was walking to class. 9/11 made me think about how people respond to transformative events on the scale of every day life which conjured my memories of kennedy's assassination. i was five years old. as a scholar of the civil war i began to wonder. what did people do at home on the street, with their families, by themselves when they heard the news of lincoln's assassination. i wanted to understand an event on the human scale. i decided to wr