WE’VE never really gotten over Lincoln’s assassination, 144 years ago this week. The news came quickly, but the full import of the deed — a sordid attack upon democracy at a most vulnerable moment in our history — took longer to settle in. Early in the morning on April 15, the first reports flashed with lightning speed along telegraph lines and railroad tracks throughout the newly united states. Twenty years earlier, it would have taken New Yorkers more than a day to know. Now the facts were instantaneous and overwhelming. By 3 a.m. Northern cities had heard of the shooting; by 8 a.m. they knew the result. . .
Up and down Broadway, and all the other arteries and capillaries of the city, shopkeepers designed makeshift shrines to the martyred president. An anonymous diarist walked for miles, drawing sketches of as many storefronts as he could (evidence suggests, but does not confirm, that the diarist was a man). Through his relentless activity — going down one street, then another, incessantly writing — this nameless reporter made the news a bit more comprehensible. His drawings, here displayed for the first time, are from a manuscript in the collection of Brown University. And more of them can be seen at nytimes.com/opinion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17widmer.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
