On the evening of April 14, 1865 John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Lincoln sustained a gunshot wound to the back of the head and was carried to a boardinghouse across the street where the surgeon general arrived to attend to him. Lincoln died the next morning on Saturday, April 15, 1865, at the age of 56. Several hours later Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the seventeenth President of the United States, and on April 18 the doors to the White House were opened for people to come through to view the coffin.… Read More
Sol B. Cohen: A Career in Music
Sol Cohen was a violinist, composer, conductor, and educator from Urbana, Illinois, who was well known and regarded in the music world, especially in Los Angeles throughout the 1920s. Cohen was born in Urbana on January 11, 1891, to prominent cigar manufacturer Nathaniel H. Cohen and Addie Bernstein Cohen. He studied under French violinist Emile Sauret in Chicago through the early 1900s before traveling to Europe in 1908 to study in Prague, Budapest, and Paris. He wrote of his experiences in his memoir, Years of Pilgrimage: Memoirs of an American Musician, saying, “I left Europe with a very fair technical equipment, a large repertoire, and a mind stored with oceans of excellent music and the stuff of the continental concert halls.”… Read More
O. Batson Hinman in the Spanish-American War
The O. Batson Hinman Papers, 1898-1899 (MS 794) contain the military documents, newspaper clippings, photographs, and diary of O. Batson Hinman, a Corporal of the regiment Company B from Newton, Illinois in the Spanish-American War.
Hinman was born in Newton in Jasper County, Illinois, and enlisted at the age of 19. His military record describes him as 5 feet 11 inches tall with a dark complexion, brown eyes, and black hair, and he was occupied as a clerk. On May 20, 1898, Hinman was promoted to Corporal in the Company B of the 4th Regiment of Illinois Volunteers.
The Spanish-American War was a short-lived conflict in 1898 between the United States and Spain that derived from the United States’ economic interest in Cuba.… Read More
The Great American People Show
The Great American People Show was a not-for-profit theater company known for plays about American history, with a particularly strong focus on Abraham Lincoln’s life and legacy. GAPS, as it became known, was a regional favorite in Illinois. Beginning in 1976, the theatre ran for twenty seasons in New Salem, near Springfield, until the company’s dissolution in 1996. In 1995, Illinois designated “The Great American People Show” as the official “state theatre of Lincoln and the American Experience.”
John Ahart, a theatre professor at the University of Illinois, founded GAPS to present history through evocative and educational theatre, and he served as the company’s artistic director and leader as they moved forward.… Read More