Historian Carroll Gibbs discusses African American life in Georgetown prior to and just after the Civil War, looking at laws that discriminated against and segregated African Americans, at historic churches in the area, at records that suggest African Americans escaped from Georgetown by the Underground Railroad, and at reactions to African Americans' gaining the right to vote.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how both the north and the south had to draft soldiers during the Civil War. Since the wealthy could buy their way out of being drafted, class tension erupted into draft riots.
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Josh Brown of the American Social History Project explains a cartoon about the fight between pro-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers in the 1850s.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the original division of public opinion over the Mexican-American War. Many accused President Polk of provoking a war.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces David Wilmot, a Democratic Representative from Pennsylvania, who, in 1848, insisted that slavery be banned in any new states acquired from Mexico.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the triangular trade route, in which 17th-century merchants sailed the Atlantic Ocean in a path between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Eventually, African slaves became part of this system.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the early 1500s in New Spain, when the issue of slavery became controversial. Dominican priest Bartolome de Las Casas issued reports of brutal savagery by the conquistadors against the Native Americans.
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David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America, says that Whitman had an almost utopian hope that his poetry could unite a country torn apart by the conflict over slavery.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, even though slavery is abolished after the Civil War, the system of share-cropping quickly emerged that kept blacks in a condition much like slavery.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes one of the horrors of slavery: the separation of families. After Emancipation, slaves wandered hundreds of miles across the south to try to find their spouses and children.
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