The Lost Museum Archive

Memorial Playbill, Ford’s Theatre

Premiering in New York City in 1858, Our American Cousin was a popular comedy about the introduction of an awkward, boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives. But on the night of April 14, 1865, the play became famous for a dreadful reason: it was the performance in progress at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., when John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. This memorial to the slain President reproduces the play’s program.

Memorial Playbill, Ford’s Theatre

Source: An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera—American Memory Collection, Library of Congress