University of Illinois Springfield students are taking us back into the past using Twitter.
Tuesday night marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in Washington DC...
And some students are creating a living history by tweeting out moments as they happened more than a century ago.
The students mission is to give people a chance to experience how the country felt during the death of Abraham Lincoln and the month-long funeral procession that followed.
Students hope people will have a chance to travel back in time with help from 21st century technology.
What if people could tweet when Abraham Lincoln was killed?
One class of students is testing the theory.
"As soon as he gets shot another tweet will go out, so really you're going to be living minute by minute what he was doing the last few hours of his life," said Julia Grigsby, UIS history student.
The Lincoln tweets will give people a chance to live history as it happened.
"Because of Twitter, we're able to put ourselves and other people in Lincoln's footsteps," said Grigsby.
History professor Kenneth Owen says the tweets will be precisely timed. His students have spent months researching to make tweets as accurate as possible.
"Attribution, the fact checking they've done to make sure we've got everything right as it fits into our timeline of tweets has been really impressive," said Owen.
You can continue following tweets from the UIS students all month until the replica funeral train arrives in Springfield at the beginning of May.
The majority of tweets on the@AbesLastRide account will begin after 7 p.m. on April 14.
This article appeared online on ourquadcities.com on April 14, 2015.
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