Wall Street Runs on Steam
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the success of the Erie Canal and the early railroads, which led to the early success of the New York Stock Exchange.
This feature is no longer available.
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the success of the Erie Canal and the early railroads, which led to the early success of the New York Stock Exchange.
This feature is no longer available.
Historian Carroll Gibbs discusses the foundation and early years of Georgetown (now part of Washington, D.C.), looking particularly at the role of African Americans in the community. He touches on the slave trade and also on the growth of African-American churches and religious communities in the city.
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Historian Anthony Sammarco follows the development of downtown Boston from the city's early years to the present day. He focuses on the area called Downtown Crossing, following the Great Boston Fire of 1872, and examines the commercial shopping establishments that replaced pre-fire residences and churches. His presentation includes slides.
This feature is no longer available at WGBH.
In this Face-to-face Talk, Ann Shumard of the National Portrait Gallery details the life of Samuel Morse (17911872), including his early interest in portraiture and art, his career as an inventor and his work on the telegraph, and his support of Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype.
This lecture is a repeat of node identification number 21992.
During the 1850s, the United States was a nation of foreboding and hope. An irresolvable conflict between North and South seemed to be approaching, along with periodic hopes that the divide could somehow be bridged and conflict forestalled. At the start of the decade, the nation's eloquent orators were led by John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster; 10 years later, a new voice had been added to public discourse: that of Abraham Lincoln. Literary artists—including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—addressed the issues of slavery, regional autonomy, and federal power both directly and obliquely in poetry and prose. This seminar will explore this ominous yet hopeful era, with the aim of understanding the political and moral issues that drove Americans apart, and how the literature of the period can help readers understand why.
Abraham Lincoln will stand at the center of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism.
This seminar explores the rise of Jim Crow in the United States and tracks it forward to its modern post-civil-rights manifestations. Seminar participants will work with a range of primary sources to interpret the shifting social, economic, political, psychological, and cultural trauma associated with this set of racial practices. Close attention will be paid to the effects of Jim Crow on both sides of the color line.
Reenactor Marcia Estabrook plays half-white, half-black slave Ellen Craft. Estabrook tells Craft's story of her upbringing as a slave and her escape from slavery dressed as a white man, with her husband posing as a slave.
This feature is no longer available from WGBH.
The American South plays a central role in American history, from the first permanent English colony through the election of 2008. This course will focus on key episodes when Southern history and the history of the nation intersected at particularly important points: the emergence and spread of slavery, the founding, the Civil War, the creation of segregation, and the civil rights struggle. The course will be taught in Richmond, Virginia, a city rich in museums and historic sites that the seminar will use to explore the subjects addressed in the seminar.
This three-day workshop examines the life of Winston Churchill. Participants will develop strategies for applying historical content in the classroom and across the curriculum.