Speaker: Paul Severance

Presented by the Lifelong Learning Institute, Manassas

This event is open to the public. For more information about the Lifelong Learning Institute, Manassas, visit lli-manassas.org

Although the official historical record confirms that John Wilkes Booth and a small group of accomplices assassinated Abraham Lincoln and attempted to kill other top government officials, numerous alternative—and often fascinating—conspiracy theories have surfaced and gained varying degrees of acceptance over the past 160 years. Almost immediately after the event, various theories began to circulate, evolving over time to implicate organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Pius IX, the U.S. War Department and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the Confederate government, and certain disaffected factions within Northern society who allegedly despised Lincoln’s wartime leadership and decisions as President and Commander-in-Chief. These theories have persisted in the modern era and remain subjects of considerable intrigue. This presentation will seek to explore these major conspiracy theories, tracing their origins and examining the purported evidence behind the seven principal theories linked to Lincoln’s assassination.

Dr. Paul Severance is a distinguished historian and educator with a career spanning more than three decades. Dr. Severance served as Professor of Strategy and Professor of Military Science at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy at Fort Lesley J. McNair from 1993 until his retirement in 2018. Since 2013, Dr. Severance has devoted his expertise to public history, serving as a volunteer historian at Gettysburg and at Fort McNair, where he has guided more than five hundred tours, seminars, and lectures in the historic courtroom of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators Trial. His work has focused on Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the pursuit and capture of the conspirators, their trial and verdicts, and the evolution of conspiracy theories that followed. Dr. Severance is also a faculty member of the Blue-Gray Education Society and is widely recognized as an authority on the American Civil War, with particular expertise in the campaigns of Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Peninsula, and the Seven Days. He holds degrees from Northeastern University, the Florida Institute of Technology, and Virginia Tech, where he earned his doctorate. Currently, Dr. Severance continues to share his scholarship as an instructor with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the College of William & Mary and the Lifelong Learning Society at Christopher Newport University, lecturing on the nature of war, forms of warfare, military history, and military geography.