Decay on Display: The Funeral Train Journeys of Abraham Lincoln and Tsar Alexander III
Journal: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year: 2019

The circumstances surrounding the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and Tsar Alexander III's death in 1894 shared little in common, but each leader's funeral evolved into a train journey traversing hundreds of miles that allowed citizens to participate in the mourning process in ways previously unimaginable. These lavish obsequies occurred on the heels of the extreme trauma associated with America's Civil War and Russia's two famines and an accompanying cholera epidemic, each of