Join us at Harry’s Hofbrau in Redwood City on Tuesday, February 17. Harry’s opens at 11 am for cafeteria style lunch; our meeting will start promptly at 12 noon. See the MEETING INFO menu item for directions. This month’s topic is

Kathryn Olivarius on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: Lincoln’s Death and a Nation’s Grief”

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln’s death came at a moment when the nation desperately needed to make sense of catastrophic loss. Over 750,000 Americans had died in four years of civil war—fathers, sons, brothers gone. Communities were shattered. The South lay in ruins. And yet there had been no national ritual to process this bloodletting, no collective ceremony to mark what had been sacrificed or why. Lincoln’s assassination changed that. As his body traveled 1,700 miles by funeral train from Washington to Springfield, millions of Americans lined the tracks and crowded into cities to participate in elaborate public rituals of grief. Black mourners, many recently freed from slavery, served as pallbearers. Immigrant societies, craft guilds, and religious groups marched in processions. The funeral became a rehearsal for democracy itself—a chance for a fractured nation to grieve together, to consecrate the war’s meaning, and to imagine reunion. This talk explores how Lincoln’s death was transformed into a sacred symbol of national sacrifice, and how his funeral allowed Americans to mourn their collective personal loss.

Kathryn Olivarius is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (2022). The book won multiple awards, including best first book prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, as well as the Humanities Book of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught Civil War and Reconstruction for a decade and lives in Palo Alto.