Ford's Theatre Presidential Box Diorama, Lincoln Assassination Re-creation, 1950

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Ford's Theatre Presidential Box Diorama, Lincoln Assassination Re-creation, 1950 — Archive & Atlas

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Ford's Theatre Presidential Box Diorama, Lincoln Assassination Re-creation, 1950 — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-CFCA81

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Sometime in the 1950s, an American tourist attraction — almost certainly Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C., which reopened as a Lincoln museum in 1932 — invited the public to stand before a diorama recreating the exact moment before John Wilkes Booth stepped through the door, and someone thought wax figures were equal to the gravity of the occasion. The Lincoln figure holds a playbill for 'Our American Cousin,' the comedy the President was watching on April 14, 1865, apparently on the theory that no detail was too grim to be educational. Mary Todd sits beside him in period dress, looking serene in the way that only wax can manage when the historical record suggests she spent the rest of her life in psychiatric crisis. The draped American flag across the front of the box railing is historically accurate, which is the one detail nobody involved in the evening would have thought worth noting. A 1950s audience raised on patriotic pageantry would have found the tableau solemn and improving; what it actually is, is the decade's confidence that history could be packaged, flag-draped, and stood in front of without anything getting too complicated.

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