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Ending slavery wasn't the only thing Abraham Lincoln did when he was President of the United States. He also saved the Republic from vampires.
Behold the new trailer from Tim Burton's movie, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter, starring Benjamin Walker and directed by Timur Bekmambetov based
on the novel
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Laughing Squid
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Abraham Lincoln, our 16th U.S. president, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. He died the next day. Okay, what is this, a history class? Everybody knows that! But who shot Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth? Well, let’s find out by looking into the life of one of the strangest, little-known men who had a part in United States history. Let’s look at the strange life of Boston Corbett.
Thomas Corbett was born in England in 1832. He immigrated to Boston where he became a born-again Christian. He adopted the city’s name in honor of his conversion. But Corbett wasn’t your normal convert. His religious zeal knew no bounds.
Fearing temptation by prostitutes, he used a pair of scissor to castrate himself. After which, he casually attended a prayer meeting (he did receive medical attention afterwards). Corbett had been married earlier, but his wife died in childbirth.
During the Civil war, Corbett became a Cavalry sergeant. After the 1865 assassination of President Lincoln, his unit took part in the search for John Wilkes Booth. On April 26th, his unit surrounded the barn where Booth was hiding and set it on fire. Corbett saw Booth through a crack in the barn and fired a single shot, mortally wounding him.
“Providence guided my hand,” Corbett told his commanding officer. By an odd coincidence, Corbett’s bullet had struck Booth in the same spot Booth’s shot had hit president Lincoln. When told of this, Corbett said, “What a fearful God we serve.”
His reward money for killing Booth was $1,653.84, the exact same amount as every other man in his unit.
Corbett instantly became famous as “Lincoln’s Avenger.” He was flooded by requests for autographs and cheered when he walked the streets. But fame, once hot and heavy, gradually died down.
Boston Corbett started suffering from severe delusions. He imagined John Wilkes Booth’s men were stalking him and thought he was in grave danger. He fled to Kansas.
In 1887, he was given
a job as doorman to the Kansas House of Representatives. One day he showed up waving a gun, declaring the House adjourned. Corbett was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The following year he escaped, and no one ever heard of Boston Corbett again.
He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minnesota. There is no conclusive proof of this, but the Great Hinckley Fire of September 1894 lists a “Thomas Corbett” on the list of the dead or missing.
Corbett was a hatter by trade. The mercury used to cure beaver pelts is thought to have contributed to his madness.
Visit guest author Eddie Deezen at his website.
Image via American Film Market
Dear Hollywood, stop making nitwitted remakes and hop on this obvious winner. When are you starting production? Tomorrow? Good.
Well, if only making movies is that easy (on the other hand, any process that greenlighted Gigli can't possibly be that rigorous, right?).
While we wait for Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies to hit the Big Screen, feast your eyes on these 19 Insane Posters for Movies That May Never Exist, over at Wired's Underwire blog:
Extending the B-movie legacy of insane posters and catchy titles, legendary showman Roger Corman and other independent producers unleash a fresh barrage of eye-popping genre hype this week at the American Film Market. Great movie posters play a key role at the annual movie marketing event in Santa Monica, California, because sci-fi filmmakers often rely on these “sell sheets” to attract production money and distribution deals even before their movies go into production.
See also NeatoShop's Zombie Shop for more Zombie goodness.
This week, mental_floss is running a series about Abraham Lincoln’s adventures as a young man, before he got into politics. In part one, we learn about a murder in Illinois. What does that have to do with Lincoln? We find out in part two, in a story of a wrestling match between Lincoln and another young man that linked the parties together. In part three, Lincoln the lawyer argues for the defense in an unorthodox but memorable manner. What happened then? Find out how all of this affected Lincoln’s political career, in part four.
You will be emancipated. Resistance is futile. Chris Krahn of Boise Tattoo made this tattoo for Michael Vellotti. Krahn’s website is worth a look. He has some really interesting pieces of work there, including one of Benjamin Franklin as an Old West robber. Link | Artist’s Website
I’ve only recently discovered Toy-a-Day, a site that offers a vast number of free papercraft patterns. All you have to do is print the PDF and fold as instructed, and voila! You have your own little paper version of Abraham Lincoln. If Abe isn’t really your thing, don’t worry – there’s a wide variety of offerings, from Angry Birds to the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper costumes. Have fun, and let us know what you make.
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I can’t tell which document Lincoln is carrying. But I intend to do what it says. deviantART user SharpWriter made this image based on a historic photograph. Really.
Link via Everyday, No Days Off
Adam Gault, Stefanie Augustine, and Carlo Vega created this animated presentation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The sound effects are particularly well done.
via First Things
Previously: The Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint Presentation
On that fateful night in 1865 at Ford’s Theatre, Abraham Lincoln’s sole bodyguard, Washington policeman John Frederick Parker, was supposed to be sitting outside the presidential box in a passageway behind the door. Trouble was, Parker couldn’t see the stage from there, so he left his post to get a better view. This was after he was three hours late to relieve the previous bodyguard earlier in the afternoon.
Even worse, during the intermission Parker went out for drinks with the coachman and footman of Lincoln’s carriage. He was not at his post when John Wilkes Booth entered the president’s box.
Was Parker ever implicated in Lincoln’s murder? Did he lose his job after this? What sort of employment record did he have before he received this prestigious assignment of guarding the president?
You can find the surprising answers in Paul Martin’s article, "Lincoln’s Missing Bodyguard," on the website for Smithsonian magazine.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
When we think about presidential tragedies, we most often go straight to the assassinations – especially Abraham Lincoln and JFK. But those are certainly not the only disasters to happen to a president. These sad tales are sure to tug at your heartstrings.
They say the death of your child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. Poor Franklin Pierce suffered through the death of all three of his children and the subsequent depression his wife went through afterward. First, Franklin’s namesake, Franklin Jr., died just three days after his birth in 1836. Although devastated, the Pierces gave parenthood another shot and were blessed with another little boy, Frank Robert, three years later. In 1841, another son was added to the household – Benjamin “Bennie” Pierce. The next two years were probably the happiest ones the Pierces ever knew – the family was healthy and Franklin had a prestigious job as a senator from New Hampshire. But then dark days hit again: Frank Robert was stricken with epidemic typhus and died in 1943 at the young age of four. Pierce’s wife, Jane, became quite clingy to their remaining son, Bennie, and doted on him almost fanatically.
Things went fine for the next 10 years, although Jane was rather upset when her husband was elected President of the United States in 1852. She wasn’t a fan of his political career and absolutely loathed Washington; spending at least the next four years there was not at the top of her list. Turns out that was the least of her worries: in 1853, President-elect Pierce, his wife and his only remaining son were taking the train from Boston when their car derailed and rolled down an embankment. There were some injuries, but only one fatality: Bennie Pierce. His parents were absolutely devastated. Pierce became an alcoholic and Jane was so empty that staff referred to her as “The Ghost of the White House.” Pierce has never gone down in history as being one of our best presidents, but it’s pretty hard to fault the guy for being a little distracted. It’s no wonder that his own party campaigned for another candidate when election time rolled around four years later. Their slogan? “Anybody but Pierce.”
Abraham Lincoln suffered similar losses. Abe was known to adore children and was thrilled to have four little boys of his own: Robert Todd, born in 1843; Edward Baker, born in 1846; William “Willie” Wallace in 1850; and Thomas “Tad” in 1853. Only one of these boys would make it to adulthood, although two of them did outlive Lincoln himself. Edward Baker – “Eddie” to his mother and “Eddy” to his father – died just a month shy of his fourth birthday in 1850. We’re still not exactly sure what killed him. Although it was called “chronic consumption” at the time, some historians now think that Eddy might have suffered from medullary thyroid cancer.
The Lincolns were terribly sad but didn’t waste any time continuing to expand the family: Willie was born just 10 months after Eddy’s death. When Abe was elected in 1961, he brought quite the rowdy bunch with him to the White House. Tad and Willie delighted in overturning furniture, imitating the soldiers on the lawn of the Executive Mansion and playing with the many gifts the American public showered on them. One of Lincoln’s visitors once walked into his office to find the Commander in Chief pinned to the floor in a playful wrestling match with his sons.
The happiness didn’t last long, though – after riding his pony in bad weather, Willie got really sick. Tad wasn’t doing too well either. After being sick for weeks, Willie died on February 20, 1862. Today, we think they boys may have contracted typhoid fever from drinking contaminated water. Tad cried for nearly a month straight after his brother’s death, and Mary was so distraught that her husband thought she might have been driven insane.
Tad lived through the death of his father three years later, but died of tuberculosis at the age of 18 in 1871. No wonder Mary Todd Lincoln was thought to be a little odd later in life – after the death of three of her sons and the assassination of her husband, don’t you think she earned the right to be a bit eccentric?
As outgoing and charismatic as Teddy was, you’d never guess that he was suppressing deep sorrow, but he was. Teddy met the love of his life, Alice Hathaway Lee, when Teddy was visiting her next-door neighbors. It was love at first sight for Roosevelt, who later wrote “As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked.” That was October of 1878. By Thanksgiving, Teddy decided he was going to marry Alice, but waited until June to formally propose. She coyly held him off another six months, but eventually accepted. They fittingly announced their engagement on Valentine’s Day, 1880. She would be dead four years later.
Alice and Teddy were happily married for about two and a half years when she got pregnant with their first child, a little girl they would name Alice. Sadly, the childbirth didn’t go so well (partially due to her undiagnosed Bright’s Disease) and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died two days later. Coincidentally, Teddy’s mother died the exact same day. Roosevelt was completely distraught and didn’t know what to do with himself, let alone an infant daughter. He wrote a short tribute to her, saying “The light has gone out of my life,” and never spoke of her in public again. He got upset when others mentioned her in his presence and refused to talk to his daughter about her mother, telling her to go ask her aunt instead. In fact, T.R. wouldn’t even call his daughter by her given name, preferring to call her “Baby Lee,” and left her in the care of her aunt for a couple of years while he went off to North Dakota to try to pull himself together. Roosevelt didn’t even mention his first wife in his autobiographies later in life, when presumably his wounds had some time to heal.
He eventually remarried a childhood friend named Edith Carow, whom his first daughter Alice absolutely loathed. Alice remarked many times later in life that she felt as if her father had pushed her away her entire life and loved her “one sixth” as much as his other children.
Jonathan Dillon was an Irish immigrant watchmaker who worked in a watch repair shop in Washington D.C. He told his children that on the day the news arrived of the attack on Fort Sumter he was repairing Lincoln’s watch.
He told them he had inscribed inside the watch these words: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."
The watch was given to the Smithsonian in 1958. No one has ever checked the truth of the man’s story – until now …
This morning, in a small conference room on the first floor of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, officials decided to find out. Expert watchmaker George Thomas used a series of delicate instruments — tweezers, tiny pliers — to pull apart Lincoln’s timepiece. He put on a visor with a magnifying lens and talked as he worked. Some of the pins were nearly stuck, he explained. The hands of the watch were original with a case made in America and the workings from Liverpool. The Illinois rail-splitter had splurged: The watch, Thomas said, would be the equivalent to a timepiece costing “$5,000 or more” today.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
A New York photography expert has unveiled what he believes is one of the last photographs of President Abraham Lincoln before he was assassinated in 1865. Only 130 photographs of President Lincoln were ever taken, and before this discovery, none with him in front of the Executive Mansion.
The purported find came after Ulysses S. Grant VI, the great-great-grandson of the former president and Civil War general, recently spotted a tall figure in the background of a photograph of the White House in a family album. Keya Morgan, the collector and Lincoln aficionado who has since bought the photograph, helped identify the man as Lincoln.
The AP says Grant also discovered a handwritten note on the back of the photo that reads, “Lincoln in front of the White House.” It was apparently written by Gen. Grant’s youngest son.
The figure in the photo is very tall and bearded, although his facial features are obscured. Lincoln was 6-foot-4.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
