This event has been a long time in the making and I signed on to take part when I was still living in Virginia. John Brown Lives! is a small organization led by Martha Swan, which focuses on public and educational outreach around issues related to freedom and oppression in history and in our world [...]
Slavery
Today in class we finish up reading a selection from historian Edmund Morgan on the evolution of slavery in Virginia. Friday’s discussion on why early in the seventeenth century many blacks enjoyed the same freedoms as other Virginians went well as did our discussion of the challenges of managing a growing and increasingly discontented population [...]
I’ve grown tired of the bitter debate over what our students know or don’t know about American history. Yes, we want them to know when the Civil War took place, be able to identify key historical terms, people and places. All too often these discussions function under the assumption that our parents and grandparents somehow [...]
Not too long ago I suggested that H.K. Edgerton’s performance is geared to and best received by white Southerners, who find vindication in his narrative of slavery as a benign institution and the peaceful co-existence of the races during the antebellum period and through the war into Reconstruction and beyond. Today I learned that [...]
I didn’t realize that yesterday I stumbled on a relatively unknown map. Hope it comes in handy for those of you in the classroom. Brooks Simpson also posted the image on his site along with a very colorful explanation of the recent decline in Boston sports. Thank you, Brooks. One of the commenters on his [...]
Like many of you I was sad to hear of the passing of historian Eugene Genovese earlier today. I was never formally introduced to the historiography of slavery in graduate school; rather, I relied on various friends and other contacts to point me in the direction of important studies as my interests both widened and [...]
Over the weekend C-SPAN televised a panel on emancipation that took place over the summer as part of the Civil War Institute. Pete Carmichael was kind enough to invite me to take part on this particular panel, though I have to admit that I felt a bit out of place next to my colleagues. The [...]
That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive [...]
