If you work at a historic site, in a historical society or for a history museum, you must read this book!

Fascinated by the first three presidential assassinations, humorist Sarah Vowell recounts her quest to uncover the gruesome, bizarre, and sometimes comical details of these violent crimes. Along the way, she visits obscure house museums and tiny historical societies (as well as statues and plaques—she loves plaques) where she meets history buffs who share her obsessions. Some help her piece together the stories and understand the personality disorders of the killers, while others discuss dull details about furnishings on display—“When one visits Jefferson Davis’s White House of the Confederacy in Richmond one learns that his bed was so short because people liked to sleep sitting up; one doesn’t hear much about how on earth Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved.”

In many ways Sarah Vowell is our favorite type of visitor, one who comes with specific questions to which she yearns to find the answers, and a keen ability to make apt connections between the past and the present.  (A word of caution: while liberals may find Vowell’s comparisons apt, the analogies may offend political conservatives.)

Her book raises a host of interesting issues for house and history museums. What if no crimes or sensational events took place at our sites? What if we don’t have a slashed and bloodstained sheet from an attempted murder, like the one on display at the William Seward House? What if our collection doesn’t contain fragments of an assassinated president’s skull along with the bullet that caused the fatal damage, as does the National Museum of Health and Medicine? Can we still tell a compelling story?

What happens when our visitors are not as adept at making meaning as Sarah Vowell is (this is, in fact, the case with many of the friends who accompany Vowell on her fact-finding missions)? How do we draw them in and get them to care about the artifacts, structures and lives of the people associated with our sites?  

The first chapter on Lincoln’s murder and assassin John Wilkes Booth’s flight from the crime scene is the best and most amusing. In this chapter Vowell describes stellar interpreters who infuse their narratives with emotion as well as one in a hoopskirt who focuses on a typical laundry day at the house where Booth stopped to collect whiskey and guns after shooting the president. The shorter, subsequent chapters on Garfield’s and McKinley’s murders are also fascinating, but the stories aren’t quite so riveting.