Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to travel back in time and try to prevent this national tragedy. Students will go back to that fateful era when the country was torn apart by a civil war. Once arriving in the nation's capital on April 9, the day that the Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse Virginia, you will have five days to complete the task before the President and Mrs. Lincoln are scheduled to be in attendance at the final performance of the Tom Taylor production, Our American Cousin.
Using the links at the bottom of this page, students will research all of the aspects leading up to this horrific crime, including: the individuals involved, the timeline of events prior to the actual shooting, the location and how it was a factor, the reasons the confederate sympathsizers wanted to kill the President, and were the killers working alone. Each corresponding page will challenge the students to accomplish a specific task related to possible ways to save the President's life.
The last page of this quest features an extended learning activity. It is here that students will be given the opportunity to draw from the information that they've gathered and to formulate solutions on how to foil the devious plot to kill the most beloved President in the history of the United States. In addition, the extended learning page also includes a writing assignment based on how the Reconstruction period, as well as the world today, would be different if Lincoln had survived the heinous attack.
In accordance with the Pennsylvania Department of Education's academic standards pertaining to 7th grade history, as indicated at Pennsylvania Department of Education, at the completion of the webquest, students should be able to:
Click on these links to begin your research!
Biography of Booth
Timeline
Location
Social Issues
Conspiracy Theory
Extended Learning
Lincoln's Ideology
Rubric
Fun Bunch Web Site
