Scott Ellsworth’s new book, Midnight on the Potomac, is about the last year of the American civil war and “the crime of the century”: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865.
Asked how the book came to follow The Ground Breaking, his acclaimed history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, Ellsworth said his thoughts focused on two areas: historical parallels to the modern-day US, and the true crime genre.
