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The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama commemorates the history of racial terror in the U.S., including slavery and the lynching of thousands of African Americans following the Civil War. The memorial is frank about the brutality and violence of this chapter in American history, and therefore the experience of visiting it might be painful and difficult. However, curators hope that the discomfort of the memorial might spark reflection and conversation that could help America heal. Listen to learn more about how memorializing America’s history of slavery and lynching can inform the present day.
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Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the most important speeches in American history. In it, Lincoln used the dedication of a Union cemetery as an occasion to tie the soldiers’ sacrifice to America’s founding principles. Lincoln spoke for just over two minutes. In just 272 words Lincoln explicitly linked human equality and democracy to the Union war effort. Listen to hear more about the original context of the speech, and hear about Lincoln’s thought process in writing the speech.
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A compromise is a way to settle a dispute by meeting each other halfway. Sometimes, a compromise may be acceptable in the moment, but there can be hidden costs. The head of Emory University caused a significant disruption by citing the Three-Fifths Compromise of the U.S. Constitution “as a positive example of political compromise.” But according to a history professor at the institution, this was “the Constitution’s fatal flaw.” This constitutional amendment impacted the future of slavery in the United States. Listen to hear one Emory professor’s perspective on the controversy and how the country’s history of slavery continues to affect us today.
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American slavery destroyed generations of human lives, and citizens in all parts of the country were complicit. The horrors of the slave system and the damage it did are at the heart of the current debate over whether descendants of enslaved people should receive reparations, or compensation for past wrongs. Listen to hear an historian make the case for reparations, detailing the brutalities of slavery and explaining how Americans at the time rationalized a cruel national institution.
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Much is known about the awful legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and, more broadly, about how European and, later, American perpetrators maintained the slave system. Much less is known, however, about enslaved people and their life experiences. Aside from slave narratives, what is known is scattered among a variety of different sources spanning the history of slavery and the slave trade. A new project has been undertaken to fill this critical knowledge gap. Listen to learn about Enslaved.org, a project that aims to document the lives and stories of enslaved people.
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