40 Acres and a Mule
Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University explains the origin of "forty acres and a mule."
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Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University explains the origin of "forty acres and a mule."
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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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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how backlash against Chinese Workers in the 1850s led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, perhaps the harshest anti-immigration legislation in American history.
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.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, to assure citizenship to blacks after the Civil War, Congress proposed the 14th Amendment. However, most Southern states refused to ratify it.
Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University discusses the Black Codes, which were written by white southerners to force blacks to keep working on plantations.
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Author, architect, and Holocaust survivor Benjamin Hirsch talks about his and his siblings' escape from Nazi Germany and their efforts to adapt to life in the American South during the 1940s, in the face of continued antisemitism.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, in the 1880s, black farmers suffered the most in the economic downturn and organized themselves into the Colored Farmers' Alliance.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, as the Civil War progresses, slaves fled north. As their numbers increased, they became a weapon of the Union Army.
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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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