A presidential cheer frozen in time

Our Times colleague Johanna Neuman has a fascinating historical yarn on this website now and in Thursday's print editions. It seems a Colorado history buff was browsing through the Library of Congress' online photo collections and thought something looked a little off in three photographs identified as taken during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant.

The reader alerted the Library that he suspected the captions were incorrect.

He was right.

Upon closer inspection, which you can do here yourself, Library authorities realized they had found three more rare photographs of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugration, on March 4, 1865, back before many of us were born and inaugurations were moved to January. The photos, taken just days before Lincoln's assassination, show the crowd dressed against a cold rain with many cheering and one man with a raised arm waving.

--Andrew Malcolm