martha hodes: i do have some idea. part of it comes from the sources i have read while researching "mourning lincoln" about white people collected relics of lincoln postcards framed portraits, his speeches but also people in 1865 -- they made pilgrimages here to washington. this theater was closed after his assassination. but people would come to washington, right there diaries "i walked around the theater." " i saw the alley where john looks booth escaped." then there is i one great woman who names down for the commemoration of the army in may, she goes to the theater and then goes across the street to peterson house. she writes in her diary that she went to the room where lincoln had died. the bloody pillow was still there, and she explains why she wanted to go there. she said "i needed to see this because it was historical fact." but then she said "because it makes it so vivid." part of the visits to the world trade center the popularity of ford's theater. making such a cut a cosmic event seemed real. even sitting i

please welcome professor martha hodes. [applause] dr. hodes: good afternoon. hello, everybody. happy to be part of this wonderful event. i have been teaching the civil war for nearly 25 years. i call my course race, civil war, and reconstruction because i want to draw students who care not only about battlefield tactics which matter, but also about larger goal historical questions. i was had a few lines of my lecture about the assassination heard several years -- assassination. several years ago, i found myself taking a greater interest in this momentous event. i trace that interest to september 11, 2001. that tuesday was the first fall semester at new york university. the first plane hit the tower as 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 skill of everyday life, which conjured my faded memories of kennedy's assassination. i was five years old in 1963. 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,