Evans, C. Wyatt

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Evans, C. Wyatt

PERSONAL:

Education: Carnegie Mellon University, B.A., 1980; Drew University, M.A., 1999; Ph.D., 2003.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940. E-mail—wevans@drew.edu.

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and writer. Drew University, Madison, NJ, assistant professor of history.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Washington Association of New Jersey fellow, 2000; Mary Lester Pennywitt dissertation prize, 2003; Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians, 2005, for The Legend of John Wilkes Booth; Bela Kornitzer Award, 2007, for outstanding faculty publication.

WRITINGS:

The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 2004.

Contributor to encyclopedias, including the International Encyclopedia of Temperance and Prohibition, edited by Jack Blocker, ABC-Clio (Santa Barbara, CA), 2004; and the Encyclopedia of Modern American Conspiracy Theory, edited by Peter Knight, ABC-Clio (Santa Barbara, CA), 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Southern Religion. Also list editor for H-SHGAPE (online forum of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era), 2003—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian C. Wyatt Evans specializes in American intellectual and cultural history, vernacular history and collective memory, and conspiracy theory in American history. These interests are encompassed in the author's first book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. Called a "provocative debut" by Library Journal contributor John Carver Edwards, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth follows the legend of Abraham Lincoln's assassin as it is embodied in a sideshow attraction that supposedly displayed the body of Booth. Supposedly, the body was identifiable from a neck scar due to a stage accident (Booth was an actor) and a broken left leg that occurred when Booth jumped from the balcony of the Ford's Theatre after assassinating Lincoln.

In his book, Evans writes how the mummified corpse helped support a romantic image of Booth and the legend that he actually survived the attack on a farm in rural northern Virginia, where Union soldiers tracked him down and killed him twelve days after the assassination. Evans shows that the remains displayed as Booth were actually those of a drifter named David George who died in 1903. Richard Byrne, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, noted that the author "argues that the tale has its roots both in cultural tropes of the era and in vernacular histories of the Civil War and Lincoln's death."

Weaving "vernacular history" into his tale, Evans follows how the legend of Booth surviving the attack by Union soldiers developed in the weeks following the assassination on through the appearance of the "Booth Mummy." In the process, he discusses how ideological and political motivations in both the South and the North led to the spread of the legend and even made it profitable for some. In addition, he examines the Booth legend's persistence to modern times. Commenting on the influence of vernacular history in an interview with Chronicle of Higher Education contributor Byrne, the author noted: "The persistence of vernacular histories transcends race, gender, lifestyle, and whatnot." Finally, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth also includes a discussion of the ironic fate of the mummy and concludes with an examination of recent efforts to exhume Booth's real remains.

"C. Wyatt Evans's study successfully combines the results of exceptional detective work with a wide-ranging exploration of the Booth legend's trajectory across the landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society and culture," wrote Martin Crawford in the Historian. Library Journal contributor John Carver Edwards called the book "a mind-teaser … worth a read."