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April, 1865. Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth fires a pistol ball into Lincoln's head, and General Sherman's army marches into the vanquished and shuttered city of Raleigh. Sometime amid that tumultuous stretch of days, an unknown infantryman rifles through the North Carolina Statehouse, hunting for Confederate mementos--but what he finds is no ordinary souvenir. He returns home with a touchstone of our Republic: one of the fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights. Lost Rights follows that document's epic passage over the course of 138 years, from the Indiana businessman who purchases the looted parchment for five dollars to the antiques dealer who tries to peddle it more than a century later for $5 million. The parchment drifts from the living-room wall of a middle-class Midwestern family into the corruptible world of high-end antiquities before its journey ends with a dramatic FBI sting on the 32nd floor of a Philadelphia office tower.



About the Author

David Howard

David Howard is an author and magazine editor who has worked as part of teams have won four National Magazine Awards. He has been the executive editor of Bicycling, Popular Mechanics, and Organic Life, and has also worked at Backpacker and Prevention. He has written for many publications, including the New York Times, Travel Leisure, Men's Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Traveler.

His first book, Lost Rights, was about the 138-year travels of an original, priceless copy of the Bill of Rights. The document was seized in 2003 in an FBI sting in an office tower in Philadelphia.

He lives in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.



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