#our american cousin

[beardedmrbean]

[deadpresidents]

After President Abraham Lincoln was shot during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre, several doctors who were in the audience and also enjoying the play rushed into the Presidential Box and began attending to the President. It was clear that Lincoln's wounds were almost certainly mortal, but the doctors still attempted to save his life. Originally thinking that the President had been stabbed, they soon found that he had been shot behind the left ear and the bullet -- a 43.75 mm ball which had been fired by John Wilkes Booth's .44 caliber Derringer -- had sliced through Lincoln's brain and lodged behind his eye sockets without exiting the skull. When Lincoln's breathing became more shallow, Dr. Charles Leale used his finger to remove blood clots from the wound, which immediately improved Lincoln's respiration.

The doctors decided to move Lincoln from the theater, but felt that the President's condition was far too weak to risk taking him back to the White House, which was several blocks away. A nearby saloon was considered just as unseemly of a place for the President to spend his last hours and likely die in as a theatre, so Lincoln was carried across the 10th Street to William Petersen's boarding house. When they brought Lincoln into the boarding house, they realized that the 6'4" President was too tall for the bed they found for him, so they laid him diagonally upon it.

It was obvious that Lincoln could not survive his wound, so the attending doctors simply tried to keep him comfortable in his final hours by clearing the blood clots in his skull that caused his breathing to become more labored. Throughout the night, the President never regained consciousness, but witnesses said that he looked peaceful as his life was drawing to a close. The only visible evidence of his mortal wound were the bloody pillows that his head rested on and the raccoon-like bruising around Lincoln's eye sockets due to the orbital bones fractured by Booth's bullet after it passed through his brain. Nine hours after he was shot, Lincoln died in Petersen's Boarding House at the age of 56.

Shortly after the President was pronounced dead, his body was placed in a coffin and transferred back to the White House in a carriage. Just a few hours later, one of the residents of Petersen's Boarding House, Julius Ulke, took a photograph (seen at the beginning of this post) of the room and the bed -- including a pillow soaked with the President's blood -- where Lincoln had died earlier that morning.

The room in Petersen's Boarding House where Abraham Lincoln died, pictured in 2007.

[facts-i-just-made-up]

tell me about the play “our american cousin”

"Our American Cousin" is a play less known for its story than its 1865 production at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., which was said to be "Well-costumed, lavish in set design, and supremely well acted despite certain distractions," according to Mary Todd Lincoln.

[do-you-know-this-play]

took a bit to find a picture of this production because all the stuff was about how it the play lincoln was seeing when he was shot

[straightplayshowdown]

Arsenic and Old Lace: Mortimer Brewster goes to visit his sweet spinster aunts to announce his engagement. Mortimer always knew that his family had a bit of a mad gene - his brother believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt - but his world is turned upside down when he realizes that his dear aunts have been poisoning lonely old men for years! When Mortimer’s maniacal brother, Jonathan, who strangely now resembles Boris Karloff, returns on the night that the aunts were planning to bury the newest victim, Mortimer must rally to help his aunts and protect his fiancé - all while trying to keep his own sanity.

Our American Cousin: The play takes place at the English country estate of Sir Edward Trenchard. The baronet’s guests include Lord Dundreary, a rather befuddled sort, and widowed Mrs. Mountchessington, towing two daughters for whom she is relentlessly hunting husbands. Problems abound: Sir Edward is busted, and Richard Coyle, his estate agent, is threatening to plunge him into bankruptcy if he does not repay an old loan. Coyle offers an out: he will destroy the loan document provided Sir Edward lets Coyle marry Sir Edward’s daughter, Florence. Florence, of course, not only detests Coyle, but is in love with Navy Lt. Harry Vernon. The couple cannot marry until Vernon gets his own ship; Lord Dundreary has the connections to make that happen but refuses to help.

Propaganda under the cut!

Arsenic and Old Lace:

it's a "farcical black comedy" "Abby and Martha Brewster, who have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and "just a pinch" of cyanide"(Wikipedia)

A man discovers that his little old aunts are killing people and having his one brother, who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, dig "the Panama Canal" in the basement so they can bury the bodies. Then his brother who's a murderer comes home after having botched plastic surgery that made him look like Boris Karloff (who played him in the original production). It's very silly and wonderful

Our American Cousin:

abraham lincoln got assassinated to it pretty cool if you ask me. + its just a funny play imo

[justletmeon12]

Our American Cousin may be my new favorite Wikipedia article.

[victortalkingmachine]

i continue my posting about characters none of you know 🙏

[flufallo]

DID NEIL GAYMEN WRITE DBD

He wrote the comics yes

[ginalinettiofficial]

played the game ok boomer at my family party today, ended up explaining to a room of ~20 of my relatives what fanfiction is so they could understand the question, “in fanfiction, what does AU stand for?”. and then the card’s definition of “AU” was wrong so i also had to get into the concept of “canon”.

can u believe. in front of my whole family. a room full of people, aged 3 to 80. all staring at me intently as i explain the difference between an alternate universe and canon divergence. at one point my mom was like “daina i think we get it” and a cousin and two aunts were like “wait no we’re interested please continue” and i had to say to my own mother in front of god and my i am kenough sweatshirt “sorry but unlike you the rest of them DON’T have to listen to me talk about fanfiction on the regular”. my uncle is a retired judge. my one cousin worked for the federal government in a job that was so classified that for years he literally couldn’t legally tell us about ANYTHING he was working on. and today those men sat and patiently listened to me define “coffee shop AU”.

also, not one, not two, but THREE of the answers for the young folks, i knew solely because they were either plot points on stranger things or they were things i found out whilst reading stranger things fanfics. and then i was the only person in our age bracket (10 people, ranging from ages 9 to 42) that knew who anne rice was, and had to explain yet again that the reason i had this knowledge was because… fanfic.

it was surreal. also my aunt, aged 68, may or may not begin attempting to read fanfic now because, according to her, “there are so many stories where there are these small side characters and i’d just KILL to hear their backstory or like what was going through their minds during the main action!” i’m very happy for her. today was wild.

[purelypacino]

doesn’t change that she’s supposed to represent the middle class WASPS that looked down upon Italians and is xenophobic because gen zers who watch this movie have no idea Italians were extremely discriminated against and it goes hand in hand with the godfather

You're probably aware that we are not living in a utopia. I'm not going to assume that Gen Zers haven't been on the receiving end of some type of discrimination. To say that they're all ignorant of that particular experience (the Italian-American one) is ignorant in itself. The expectation of such knowledge is also rooted in Americentrism, but let me not stray from my point.

I'm confident that there are still immigrants who know, and whose children know, what it's like to be newly arrived and called names and told to go back to where they came from or admonished for their broken English. Immigration didn't end with the closure of Ellis Island.

If they haven't encountered it firsthand, they've been made aware of it through their family history. It's part of mine on all sides: Polish, Italian, even Scottish. My Italian great-grandparents settled in a city that was almost like Little Italy, there were so many of them. Still, they encountered discrimination. We've got stories for days.

Some old ten-gallon-hatted cowboy with an accent like microwaved grits told my dad in 1972 that his Scottish accent would be a problem. He wouldn't hire him. His dearth of Canadian experience stood in his way more than once. He didn't even have to go to the trouble of Anglicizing his first and last name the way the other sides of my family did theirs. So, I know about it! My stories are not unique.

I get that certain events and experiences don't always get the exposure that they deserve and that the further away from them we get, the more important it is to keep their lessons alive. But again, just because you've run across a handful of people who don't know something that you know, it doesn't mean that everyone born after 1997 is clueless. Nobody is born knowing everything.

If any of us ever want to bridge the gap between generations, we can't approach the other with an attitude of superiority and ultimate authority. If they don't know, they can learn, but not if we treat them like close-minded doofuses.

[sombraluna]

hey what if you didn’t support the genocide of your own people. just a thought kapo

Hey. What if one billion points lava damage.

[4thbrighteststar]

</3

[other-peoples-coats]

Scifi FEELS like it is supposed to have kiwi accents AotC and other exposures happening within a close ish time period did something to my American lil child brain I think

haha, that's fair! I think I very much got used to hearing english (dr who!) or american (uh everything else) in scifi, and in...well, like everything else (that was in english, at any rate), that I'm always thrown when I hear someone speaking like I'd expect to hear if I ran into them at the shops.

Also, I think there's a bit of -- english and american accents, for the most part, feel, uh, made up? like I know they're real, my wife is american, I have english friends, but there's still a bit of...I guess 'this is an accent that is Made Up For Media' about them? like 'oh yes, space ships real, american accent, lazer swords and "blasters", etc etc, all of this is fictional', and then there's someone in the middle of it being like 'aw yiss thet's how yu doo et' and it's the biggest record scratch moment because like, hang on, that's a REAL person. like a real person who wandered into the movie off the street.

(also, yes, my wife takes great delight in being like 'not that's also not made up for tv, that's just what america is like', and every time I am baffled. what do you mean the red solo cups are A Thing For Real. what do you mean highschools have lockers with combination locks. what do you mean highschool/uni sports are Really A Big Deal. etc.)

[mistmoose]

I need a big found family to just, like, come over so I can justify everything I cook on holidays. Big appetites are required. Must love cookies and cats. Or just the cats.

[antebellumite]

The American Statesman: Or, Illustrations of the Life and Character of Daniel Webster. Designed for the American Youth has so many good ( possibly true ) anecdotes if you just skip the moral lessons…

[victortalkingmachine]

what happened to non-romantic kissing on the lips ?? why did it stop.