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Civil War Letters

Private Voices, also known as the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, is an online archive of thousands of letters written by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Because the soldiers lacked formal education and wrote “by ear,” the...

Bumpkin Talk

Our American Cousin, the farce being performed when President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, had some choice lines of bumpkin talk. One of them, “You sockdologizing old man-trap!,” was the play’s biggest laugh line...

Riddled Through with Riddles

Here’s a riddle: “Nature requires five, custom gives seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven.” Think you know the answer? You’ll find it in this week’s episode, in which Grant and Martha discuss this and other...

Sockdologizing

They were the last words Abraham Lincoln heard before John Wilkes Booth assassinated him: “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside-out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap!” Booth knew that this line from the play Our American...

pant-load

pant-load  n.— «You can recognize notoriety by the three-name phenomenon. John Wilkes Booth, John Wayne Bobbitt, Mary Tyler Moore (just kidding). Shoot, it’s already happened to Harding’s pant-load of a bodyguard, Shawn Eric Eckardt...

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