Legal history

Time to read over Xmas break? Try American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, just published this November. Great for Lincoln buffs in general and those specifically interested in the assassination's legal aftermath. Michael W. Kaufman loaded 11,000 documents from National Archives microfiche collection into an interactive database so he could re-sort by hundreds of criteria and look for previously unnoticed patterns and connections. Descriptions of the military tribunal and state criminal prosecutions are rich in legal detail (for ex., under existing rules of evidence, conspirators could not act as witnesses if they were indicted) and capture the drama and intensity of the events as they happened.