President Abraham Lincoln was  shot in the head at Ford’s
Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. The assassin,
actor John Wilkes Booth (below), shouted, “Sic semper
tyrannies! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as
he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln
died the next morning.

John Wilkes Booth’s pistol used to kill President Abraham Lincoln is displayed at a new exhibit at the Ford’s Center for Education and Leadership.  

The box where Abraham Lincoln was shot is seen at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC on April 1, 2015.

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally
shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room
at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader
was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on
his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed
his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a
Memphis hospital. He was only 39 years old.

The balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Mulberry Street, Memphis, Tenn., April 6, 1968, just after the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s assassination.

Martin Luther King Jr.  (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, was killed in the
streets of St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary “People’s Will” group. The People’s Will, organized
in 1879, employed terrorism and assassination in their attempt to overthrow Russia’s czarist autocracy. They murdered officials
and made several attempts on the czar’s life before finally
assassinating him on March 13, 1881.

William McKinley (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901)

On January 29, 1843, William McKinley, who will become the
25th American president and the first to ride in an automobile, 
was born in Niles, Ohio. McKinley served in the White House
from 1897 to 1901, a time when the American automotive
industry was in its  infancy. During his presidency, McKinley
(who died from an assassin’s bullet in September 1901) took
a drive in a Stanley Steamer (below), a steam-engine-powered
auto built in the late 1890s by Francis and Freelan Stanley. The
Stanley Motor Carriage brothers Company produced a number
of steam-powered vehicles before going out of business in the
early 1920s, after being unable to compete with the rise of less
expensive gas-powered cars.

The Stanley Motor Carriage Company was an American manufacturer
of steam cars; it operated from 1902 to 1924. The cars made by the company were colloquially called Stanley Steamers, although
several different models were produced.

 
Twins Francis E. Stanley  
(1849–1918)

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY       LEE HARVY OSWALD

(FoxNews) – The National Archives and Records Administration on Wednesday released nearly 1,500 confidential documents related to
the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. 

The agency released the files via their website. Historians, political scholars and believers in a wide range of theories about Kennedy’s assassination immediately began poring over the documents.

Many of the documents relate to Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Many files also reference tensions between the United
States and Cuba, evaluating statements from leader Fidel Castro
that allude to the possibility of Kennedy being in danger due to escalating aggression between the two nations.