![]() ![]() This is what's so important about that speech, and it's what makes that ground sacred to me, is Douglass used this moment to warn the government - sitting right in front of President Grant and the whole crew - that they are losing the battle for Reconstruction. So tell us more about what he said and why that's so significant.īLIGHT: Sure. MARTIN: So I want to mention here that, professor Blight, you're the author of the biography "Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom." And you talk about the fact that Frederick Douglass is connected to this monument in a very significant way. One crucial fact, too, is that the entire government was there and represented - President Grant, members of the Cabinet, Supreme Court justices, members of the House and Senate - the entire government. And Frederick Douglass was the orator of the day. The unveiling was preceded by a massive parade, by African Americans, drum and bugle corps, cornet bands and all the rest. The money was raised by African Americans - $20,000 almost entirely by African Americans.Īnd the day that it was dedicated was a federal holiday in the city. Sanitary Commission, which is an organization founded during the war to care for troops. And finally, it was organized by the U.S. There were many designs to build a monument to Emancipation and Lincoln. Tell us about how it came to be.īLIGHT: Well, it came to be over many years. It's also called the Freedman's Memorial. MARTIN: Tell us a bit more about the memorial. Professor Blight, thank you so much for joining us.ĭAVID BLIGHT: Thank you so much, Michel. David Blight is with us now to tell us more about why he says that. But he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post this week saying, don't tear it down. It's the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park in a residential neighborhood close to Capitol Hill, and it depicts a standing Lincoln towering over a kneeling, shirtless African American man with chains broken, newly freed.Ĭritics say the imagery itself is racist, and David Blight, a professor of history at Yale University, agrees. In Washington, D.C., protesters have been demanding the removal of a monument honoring another former president, Abraham Lincoln. It's just one of the many honors and tributes and memorials being reconsidered now. In a statement, the university's board of trustees said Wilson's, quote, "racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake" - unquote. Norton.Princeton University today announced that it will remove former President Woodrow Wilson's name from its public policy school and a residential college. William Gienapp, ed., Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Johnson, ed., Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Harper & Row.įrederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. University of North Carolina Press.Įric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Hill and Wang.ĭavid Blight, Why the Civil War Came. And finally, we hope to probe the depths of why the Civil War era has a unique hold on the American historical imagination.īruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. ![]() The course attempts, in several ways, to understand the interrelationships between regional, national, and African-American history. We will especially examine four broad themes: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. ![]() This course will explore the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. ![]()
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