I love their premise:
On one fact alone do scholars agree: President Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. All else is suspect!There's a lot of historic sensibility in that. It is the diametric opposite of McPherson-flavored Centennial certitudes. And think about this:
... experts including Ed Bearss, Warren Getler, Elizabeth Leonard, and H. Donald Winkler will immerse you in the key conspiracy theories. Was Booth acting as a lone gunman? A player in an internal Union scheme? A tool of the Confederacy? A cog in an insidious global plot?You could break down every major controversy in the Civil War into a Socratic dialog of this type in which the contrary interpretations are tested, examined, and weighed.
Your storylines would fall apart, of course, and with that your chance for mass sales slip away. And so, the ACW pop historian's credo must remain "Relax reader, I've got it covered."
Civil War readers will not be immersed in theories. Nor in competing accounts of the same event. No one will ask readers to exercise their judgement after presenting raw evidence.
That's for conspiracy buffs. And spy museums.
