This has been a momentous week for early Americanists, with the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln assassination to start the week and, especially for those of us in Massachusetts, the annual commemorations of Patriot’s Day this weekend. We have lots of great links for you below the fold!

We start this week with several items from the Junto Self-Promotion Department:

• Jessica Parr appeared on the Ben Franklin’s World podcast hosted by Liz Covart to talk about her new book, Inventing George Whitefield.
• Ken “Lincoln Tweets” Owen has a group of his students from the University of Illinois-Springfield running a Twitter feed (@AbesLastRide) recounting the events of 150 years ago this month surrounding Lincoln’s assassination and funeral cortege from Washington to Springfield. Ken was interviewed about the project by several media outlets in Illinois.
• Tuesday was the 155th anniversary of the first delivery to California by the Pony Express, and Google celebrated with an addictive Doodle and game. I offer a bit of historical background to the short-lived mail service.
• Michael Hattem has storified the “Early American Worlds: A State of the Field Conversation” panel in which he participated at this past weekend’s 2015 OAH Annual Meeting.

The Associated Press posted the story it released on April 14, 1865 about the attack on President Lincoln. Rebecca Onion, editor of the Slate Vault, collected a number of online sites to read assassination-related documents.

A group from the Cherokee Nation is in training for an annual “Remember the Removal” bicycle ride to take place in June from New Echota, GA to Oklahoma.

Denise Price has recently authored a pop-up book about the Freedom Trail in Boston, just in time for Patriot’s Day.

New York City acknowledges that it operated a slave market with the announcement that it will place a marker on Wall Street near the site.

A new novel by playwright Larry Kramer claims that George Washington was “a big queen.” Posted without comment.

Ben Affleck recently appeared on the PBS show Finding Your Roots, but he asked host Skip Gates to omit that one of his ancestors owned slaves.

Are you watching the second season of TURN? Historian Rachel Smith is tweeting her reactions as @spycurious. She’s also blogging about the show at TURN to a Historian.

On the 225th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s death, George Boudreau argues in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the city should rename its airport after the well-traveled Founding Father.

From the writers of Homeland comes a new scripted documentary miniseries  on “the founding of America” called Saints & Strangers, set to air this fall on the National Geographic channel.

For the second time in the last five years, a previously-unknown Jupiter Hammon poem has been discovered. This one, dating to 1770, was found by independent scholar Claire Bellerjeau in the New-York Historical Society’s manuscript archives. N-YHS editor Anna Gedal interviewed Bellerjeau about her find.

Following her guest post a couple of weeks ago on scholarly publishing and open access in the Humanities, Omohundro Institute director Karin Wulf has joined the Scholarly Kitchen as its newest contributor.

At the Brooklyn Brewery, the chefs have dared its patrons to go Dutch (as in seventeenth-century Dutch cuisine, that is).

The History News Network interviewed Johann Neem of Western Washington University about whether the new Common Core standards threaten the teaching of history.

Congratulations go out to Kyle Volk, author of Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy and the freshly minted winner of the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians.

The Papers of George Washington has begun a Washington Bibliography Project to find create a tool to find any book about the first President.

To encourage research into the newly opened archives of King George III, the Omohundro Institute is offering two month-long fellowships for research in London. The deadline is May 1.

At Inside Higher Ed, Patrick Iber writes about the extraordinary toll of the multi-year job search.

Audrey Truschke offers advice at Dissertation Reviews about the process of revising a dissertation into a book manuscript.