This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from How Stuff Works.com.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Doudy.

And I'm Diblini Chalker Boarty.

And around Christmas this year, listener Hillary sent us the book, Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowl about the assassinations of three U.S. presidents, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

And before I started the book, I figured of those three, I'd probably know the most about Lincoln's assassination,

at least the scene towards theater, the circumstances, Lincoln shot point blank in the head,

and the players involved, the actor John Wilkes Booth and his motley crew of conspirators. But I

hadn't realized the entire breadth of the attack.

The attack on Lincoln was really just one part of three planned assassinations that were

supposed to go down that night.

And I hadn't realized the intensiveness of the manhunt for Booth either, or the strange,

sad stories about peripheral figures involved, like Booth's brother, the

president's son, the Lincoln's theater guest, the night of the assassination. It really

proved to be a more in-depth and more fascinating story than I had imagined. So in this podcast,

we're going to talk about what happened the night of April 14, 1865 at Ford's Theater,

but also some of the events that happened long before that and long after.

And if you're a Lincoln buff, we hope that you'll get to hear your favorite weird detail

or conspiracy theory about this. And if you're not, then you're probably going to be in for some

surprises. It's sometimes fascinating to extend the story beyond the point that we're used to hearing.

Which for most people is probably Booth jumping over the railing of the president's box and escaping.

But the first semi-surprise of this podcast is going to be that John Wilkes Booth,

...