Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis tells six stories from the early years of the American Republic, looking at the choices the Founding Fathers faced and the choices they made. Ellis examines the impact these decisions had on U.S. history and how they relate to current situations and life.
Professor and author Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham discusses the creation of the book African American Lives, coedited with Henry Louis Gaters, Jr. The book covers the lives of over 600 notable African Americans, from earliest colonial times to the present day. Higginbotham examines the impact of these individuals on history, the challenges presented in choosing individuals for coverage, and the research required to compile the book.
Audio and video options are available.
Author John Hanson Mitchell outlines his discovery of 2,000 antique glass plate negatives by a previously unknown 19th-century African-American landscape photographer, Robert Alexander Gilbert. Mitchell presents slides of Gilbert's work, and discusses what is known of Gilbert's life.
Writer Carol Bundy talks about the life of her great-great-great uncle, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., a Boston abolitionist and industrialist eventually killed in the Civil War. The presentation includes slides.
Audio and video options are available.
Scholars P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts reveal historical details previously lost to time about the life of Harriet Wilson, author of the 1859 novel Our Nig; Or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Considered by some to be the first North American African-American novelist, Harriet Wilson largely disappeared from the historical record in 1863 until the discovery of new information.
Executive Director of the Museum of Afro-American History Beverly Morgan-Welch discusses the history of the Museum's meeting house and of the museum itself.
Stephen Kendrick, author of Sarah's Long Walk, traces the history of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education landmark decision in favor of school desegregation back through American history to a court case in 1848. In 1848, African-American attorney Robert Morris supported a Boston African-American man in suing for his daughter's right to go to a desegregated school close to her home.
A panel of scholars responds to the second part of the PBS miniseries Slavery and the Making of America, which focuses on the Northeast, and includes the story of Mum Bett, who sued for her freedom in Massachusetts and whose victory led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783.
Director of the National Center for History in the Schools Gary Nash examines the stories of African Americans during the Revolutionary War and the early years of the United States. Nash focuses on the search to define identity by these African Americans, whether slave or free.
Director of the National Center for History in the Schools Gary Nash considers whether or not the Founding Fathers, in forming the United States of America, could have successfully abolished slavery.