Mourning Lincoln: Rethinking the Aftermath of the Civil War

Public responses to Lincoln’s assassination have been well chronicled, but Martha Hodes is the first to delve into personal and private responses—of African Americans and whites, Yankees and Confederates, soldiers and civilians—investigating the story of the nation’s first presidential assassination on a human scale. Black freedom, the fate of former Confederates, and the future of the nation were at stake for everyone, whether they grieved or rejoiced when they heard the news. 

Martha Hodes is Professor of History at New York University and the author of Mourning Lincoln (2015), The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (2006), and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (1997). She holds degrees from Bowdoin College, Harvard University, and Princeton University, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Whiting Foundation. Hodes has presented her scholarship across the United States, in Europe, and Australia, and is a winner of NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award. 

The Washington History Seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.wilsoncenter.org/collection/washington-history-seminar for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.