Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner were the new media moguls of their day. Together they brought the Civil War and all of its terrible suffering into Northern living rooms. Newspapers sold
out when they ran their photos, and, by the end of the war, they were locked in fierce competition. When the biggest story of the century?Lincoln’s assassination?broke, their paparazzi-like
race intensified. Whoever could take the most sensational?or ghastly?photo would achieve lasting fame.
Shooting Lincoln tells the astonishing behind-the-photograph story of these two media pioneers who raced to "shoot" Lincoln in the days after he died and the assassins on the day
they died. The photos they took electrified the country, unlocking the passion of Americans for close-up views of history as it happened.