A pair of front-row balcony tickets to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865 — the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth — sold at auction for $262,500, according to a Boston-based auction house.
The tickets are stamped with the date, “Ford’s Theatre, APR 14, 1865, This Night Only.” They bear the left-side imprint “Ford’s Theatre, Friday, Dress Circle!” and are filled out in pencil with section (“D”) and seat numbers “41″ and “42”, according to RR Auction.
The handwritten seating assignments and the circular April 14th-dated stamp match those found on other known authentic tickets, including a used ticket stub in the collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, auction officials said.
The Harvard stub, which consists of just the left half of the ticket, is the only other used April 14th Ford’s Theatre ticket known to still exist, with similar seat assignments filled out in pencil and a stamp placed identically to the ones on the tickets auctioned off Saturday.
Just after 10:00 p.m., during the third act of the play “Our American Cousin,” Booth entered the presidential box at the theater in Washington, D.C., and fatally shot Lincoln.
As Lincoln slumped forward in his seat, Booth jumped onto the stage and fled out a back door. The stricken president was examined by a doctor in the audience and carried across the street to the Petersen House, where he died early the next morning. Booth evaded capture for 12 days but was eventually tracked down at a Virginia farm and shot.
Also sold at Saturday's auction was a Lincoln-signed first edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which fetched nearly $594,000.
Supreme Court justices seemed in broad agreement that businesses can’t cite minor costs or hardships to reject requests from workers who need schedule or other accommodations because of their religious practices.
Fox and Dominion Voting Systems have reached a $787 million settlement in the voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledged Monday to pass legislation to raise the nation's debt ceiling — but only on condition of capping future federal spending increases at 1% — as he lashed out at President Joe Biden for refusing to engage in budget-cutting negotiations to prevent a debt crisis.
U.S. Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican whose lies about his background and wealth helped propel him into office, announced Monday that he's running for reelection.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are ratcheting up pressure on Walt Disney World.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday urged Americans to take action during “a critical point in our nation’s history” as thousands of protesters demonstrated across the country against new limits to abortion rights making their way through the courts.
As explosions and gunfire thundered outside, Sudanese huddled in their homes for a third day Monday in the capital Khartoum and other cities, while the army and a powerful rival force battled in the streets for control of the country.
Norwegian battery startup Freyr is planning its next factory in an Atlanta suburb because a new U.S. clean energy law offers generous tax credits for local production.
Next month, the IRS will release the first in a series of reports looking into how a publicly run system might be created.
Without citing a reason, the Delaware judge overseeing a voting machine company’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News announced late Sunday that he was delaying the start of the trial until Tuesday.
