Wallet carried by Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination, April 14, 1865.

On the night of April 14th 1865, in the balcony of the Ford Theater, a man called John Wilkis Booth crawled up with a pistol in his hand and shot at point blank range, one of the most important figures of the 18th century, Abraham Lincon. At the time of the shooting, among other things in his pocket, Mr Lincon had a brown leather trifold wallet that was lined with purple silk, its compartments embossed with gold lettering: “Notes,” “U. S. Currency,” and “R. R. Tickets.” These pockets suggest what a person from the middle of the 19th century might need to carry with him: paper notes, paper money, and paper railroad tickets. Perhaps no wallet represents or tells a better story of its form, function and value in the 18th century more than the one found in Abraham Lincoln's coat pocket on the night of his assassination. Now housed in the U.S. Library of Congress, it contained a five-dollar Confederate bill (likely a souvenir of victory in the civil war) and eight newspaper clippings of the time. As the Library’s curators note, while the wallet is associated with his death, "the contents speak more to how he lived." This transformation of the wallet into a personal archive wasn't just for presidents. Scattered in museums like the Imperial War Museum in the UK, and multiple war memorials and museums across Korea, India and Japan are wallets from soldiers, survivors and refugees in the World Wars and the shifting political lines of the preceding years. These humble leather objects didn't just carry money; they carried letters from home, photos of loved ones and tiny tokens of memory - a tangible connection to a life they prayed to return to and a memory of what they had left behind. The wallet didn't just hold currency, it had become a sanctuary.