Transcripts For CSPAN3 Teaching Underground Railroad History 20170423

[inaudible] he served as president of the National Underground railroad National Underground Railroad Freedom center for six years and worked at the National Museum of American History for 20. His most important exhibition was the groundbreaking field to factory. It generated a National Discussion on migration, race. He also cocurated the american presidency, a glorious burden. The National Underground Railroad Freedom center has attracted worldwide attention because of the quality of its presentation and focus on race, interracial cooperation, and issues of contemporary slavery. He has published extensively in the areas of public history. He is the past chair of the National Council for history education. He has been selected to the organization of american historians distinguished lecture symposium. He graduated from Brown University and holds a masters degree in a doctorate degree from rutgers university. [applause] he holds the chair of Civil War History at Dickinson College and serves as the director of the house divided project, an effort to build digital resources on the civil war era. He has previously held visiting fellowships at the strategic studies at the u. S. Army war college and the National Constitution center in philadelphia. He is the author of two books Abraham Lincoln and lincoln sanctuary. His next book is forthcoming, candidly titled understanding Abraham Lincolns partisan leadership. He has also published widely on the underGround Railroad and various topics, and contributed to the journal of American History and several other academic journals as well as newspapers such as the baltimore sun, los angeles times, philadelphia inquirer, and usa today. He appears regularly on tv channels such as cspan and a e. He currently serves the organization of american historians as a distinguished lecturer. He sits on the Advisory Boards of several historic organizations such as fords theater society, the gettysburg foundation, the National Civil war museum, and president lincolns cottage of the soldiers home. He graduated from Harvard College and received a doctorate in philosophy degree in modern history from the university of oxford. [applause] dr. Timothy wescott is an associate professor of history at Park University. His research is focused on numerous regional subjects. He has presented numerous public presentations and conference papers. He is completing work on a biography of george creel and publishing his doctoral dissertation on the underGround Railroad. He coedited a recent publication, 140 years of pioneering education, the study of Park University. He has received Numerous University in teaching awards, including the department of defense award. He serves on the missouri conference on the history steering committee. Dr. Wescott graduated from the university of missouri kansas city and received his doctoral degree from the Union Institute and university in cincinnati, ohio. [applause] welcome. I want to thank jonathan, alexander, and mark for those introductions. I want to express my gratitude to the National Archives staff, Park University colleagues, and cspan 3 staff for recording the discussions, and for you for attending. The subject of the underGround Railroad is always exciting and engaging. The three of us will bring a a macro view of the subject but also some micro perspectives. We plan to speak about 3040 minutes, at which time we will be pleased to answer questions. The microphone is there in the center. Cspan would appreciate audience members to use the microphones when posing questions. Both of you have researched wide topics in africanAmerican History. What brought you to focus on the perspectives related to the underGround Railroad . What got me interested, i began working at the Freedom Center in cincinnati. I was attracted to the Freedom Center because of the topic area and because of the focus on individuals being able to make a change on society. The fact that the story is a very powerful one, a very inspiring one. I came to the underGround Railroad as a teacher. I had difficulty teaching underGround Railroad in the classroom. I think a lot of us do. And then i discovered the reason why it was elusive was because we had been ignoring a lot of the records. I was able to benefit from being a teacher in the age of the digital revolution and was able to gain access to a lot of the records, legal cases, newspapers. I was able to put it together in a way that made sense to me and i began training other teachers, k12 educators across the country. That is how spencer and i met years ago. The way we teach the underGround Railroad has been revolutionized in the last 20 years and im trying to contribute to that. Your point about digitalization is important, where resources become more available. One of the topics is the new dimensions and perspectives and the digitalization and availability of those records. When we started, we had to go through the archives. Your students, now we do not need to do that necessarily. Looking toward the future, how important is technology, the continued evolution of the technology in telling that story . It depends on how you are focusing your research and who you are looking at in terms of the story. It depends on how you are focusing your emphasis. What i have found is if you are interested in the unspoken individuals, that tends to be an underground, get your hands dirty into the archives sort of thing. If you are trying to learn about if you are looking at newspapers and the more public areas, digitalization makes a big difference. It depends on how you are beginning to look at this. In and around the area of Northern Virginia and that is not digitized. You have to go down to the local historical societies. Since we are in the archives, archives always matter. No one wants to get rid of archives. The phrase underGround Railroad is a metaphor used by propagandists on either side, but especially antislavery activists. It was used to popularize what they were doing. You could use digital surfaces and database to uncover the first usages of that term or variations. Eighthgraders could do that. It is really kind of remarkable. High School Students and College Students can do this almost as effectively with the tools that are in front of them. I have access from my desktop to reimbursement letters that agent sent for Harriet Tubman when she wore out the shoes on her escapes from maryland through pennsylvania. You can chart her passageway from the Eastern Shore of maryland to philadelphia to new york through different records that have been discovered. A collection of records used in a book that was just published a year ago that documents one of Harriet Tubmans escapes with one of her brothers. Remarkable story that was not accessible before. Any student can see it. Not just hear about it but see the documents. The subject of the underGround Railroad is surrounded by myth and mystery. Maybe that is what is intriguing about it. Have you diffused the myth and historical accuracy regarding studying the underGround Railroad . I will lay something out there that might provoke some people in the room. We all have our attitudes and ideas about what is true and what is not. I focus on documents. Committee records, legal records, and newspaper records. Many people believe in certain folklore. Quilt code or song code. I can tell you from where i sit that almost all of the stories seem to be invented in the 20th century. They do not even come from 19th century. Quilt codes, for example, i do not find any instances of them in my research. I do not think any working historian i know of has documented them. I know teachers who teach it. Same with songs. To a degree, same thing is true about the passageways and tunnels. Obviously, there were hiding places. Most of those stories are modernday folklore trying to explain how the tiger got his spots in a way that does not reflect the reality of the escapes in the 19th century. I would agree with that. What i find most interesting, the whole concept of the underGround Railroad is not a railroad that was underground. It is a metaphor for a system of trying to help people gain their freedom. The other is, if you talk to different communities, everyone believes that their ancestor was a part of the underGround Railroad and their house had a passageway. I think those sort of myths are interesting. I have my students read the autobiography of levi coffin. The fact that a lot of people after the war decided they were connected to the underGround Railroad, they were a participant. It is beginning to decipher who was actually part of this versus those who are johnnycomelatelys. The other part for me, i think about this, the sense that if i had lived then, i would have been a part of this. I would have stepped forward. Getting people to understand the challenges that go with this and how hard those choices are for people to make. The getting to unwrap the story, the human side of it, so they have a better sense of what was involved in being a part of the underGround Railroad. One of the questions i ask, what is the most important part of the underGround Railroad . All these interesting answers. Loyalty, bravery. Well, what you really need to have, enslaved people willing to run away. That is often a part that is not emphasized enough. That freedom is worth the risk, and that is a major decision. These are almost like two different subjects. About 20 years ago, there was a really good book called runaway slaves. They talked about, after Extensive Research and plantation records, they estimate 100,000 slaves runaway each year but not to the north or to canada or mexico. Temporary escapes, partial escapes. They focused on that. I feel like the subject of the underGround Railroad is about the people who helped them. Obviously, you cannot have one without the other. There is a huge story of runaway and that is only partially related to what we think of as the underGround Railroad. And i know they overlap but it is almost like a venn diagram of topics and i do not be think people often understand that. I think you are right, understanding the underGround Railroad as it manifests itself in the north is in an part of the story. But how are these individuals getting from these plantations to the north . Sometimes it is on their own, and sometimes there are others that help them along the way. There is a system of enslaved people helping other enslaved people gain their freedom. The best example is in ohio, i forgot the name of the individual, and enslaved man who brought people across the ohio river to freedom and then went back to enslavement. One of the key people helping was called sam the slave who would talk to people to find out their status. I agree, if we think about the underGround Railroad in terms of connecting to individuals to help them, that is important. We still have a lot to learn about what is that system that operates in the south. One of our researchers did some Interesting Research in which he ran across an incident of Union Soldiers who had been imprisoned there and escaped and made their way north to ohio. What they wrote about was the fact that they were able to make the escape is because they connected to enslaved people along the way who provided them with shelter and food. I do not know how well organized that is, but there is Something Else going on here in the south. It is part of what garrett talked about. For him, the underGround Railroad mythology had to do with what is going on in the north. But there is a lot more for us to figure out. I have some colleagues in newport news who have looked at william stills writing in terms of what happened in the area. You read Henry Box Brown, there is an underground Railroad System operating enrichment. There were two or three people who had done this before with suggestions on how to move forward. There is lots more for us to learn, especially the Southern Side of it is a great place for greater research. Taking from both of those, not only should we continue to study the south, but i would advocate when need to study [indiscernible] i think some of our stories could amplify out here because most of our persons of color come from the south. There is a dissertation that needs to get published. [laughter] i start my presentations and i will ask the question when we get to the end of this, i will ask you a question. Would you be willing to risk, you personally, your life, your property, your wife, your children, to hide someone you do not know . We can sit here and say yes. When you really have to think about losing all of that, i always come back to that question at the end. It is amazing, well, i really dont know. Right, but, there is a tremendous difference in the risks people took in slave states and free states. There were more people who spent more time in jail in kentucky and missouri that in the entire north after the fugitive law. I can only name a handful of people who were actually prosecuted under the 1850 law. The longest sentence i can think of was three months. One sentence was an hour. One man in chicago was sentenced to a week in prison but they let him out every night to have dinner. [laughter] that is for real. That did not happen in missouri. That did not happen in kentucky with some of the people helping slaves escape across the ohio river. One man spent 17 years in prison. People were tortured in florida or virginia. When Henry Box Brown escaped, nobody in philadelphia went to jail. The people in richmond who got caught, one man spent nearly 17 years in jail. We have an imaginary line. We call it stateline road now. [indiscernible] it was interesting how, we had no natural barrier for escape. This is why it matters. The underGround Railroad, we usually only think about federal laws. The law that really applied was state law. Personal liberty log in the north. If you do not understand state law, you cannot understand the underGround Railroad. The thing about slavery and escape is the law. Very few people know it. That is what we have to do a better job of teaching. Both of you have mentioned garrett. 1961. I will google it later. Station masters, escaping persons of color were engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience. How do academic and public historians infuse the 19th century nonviolent disobedience to teach about the underGround Railroad . You start with that. [laughter] that is a big one. What you find most effective with students, start with a place they are more familiar with and carry them back into that. You begin talking about how it operates, and begin to think about how that operates what kind of commitment it calls for and how it may affect your life. Allow them to carry that back to get a better sense of pastime. As we talked about before, i think nonviolent is a part of what happens in the underGround Railroad but it is not covering the full spectrum of things taking place. We talked about John Fairfield is a kentuckian or virginia, i forget. He decides he will go south and bring enslaved people out and if violence is part of what has to happen, so be it. Part of the nonviolent side of it comes with the connection of the quakers. They were nonviolent and preached against it. If you begin to look at it in terms of the south, they are going to protect themselves. For them, it is a commitment to the idea of helping those trying to gain freedom. They would prefer nonviolent. But they will not stay away from confrontation. It is a matter of having people understand the complexity of it and not to think of it in just one term or another. There are variations on a theme. That is how i begin to think of this issue of nonviolent activism. I would not call the civil disobedience a myth. It is obviously true there were people who believed in it. These are feisty quakers. I do not think civil disobedience is the best way to characterize the underGround Railroad. There was a lot more violence than he wrote about. One thing that historians have done since the 1960s, they document a lot more resistance efforts. 80 resistance efforts that garrett did not write about. I am working on these digital searches with my students and we see pockets of violent resistance that have escaped the attention of most historians because there were clippings in local newspapers that have been forgotten and now that you can search them, they are much easier to find. The fight was not just violence. They have an arsenal of lawyers who have filed writs of habeas corpus, even federal marshals got arrested for violating personal liberty rights of free blacks and runaway slaves. That was a remarkable litany of tools the antislavery courses had. You take, for example, the case in 1848. Some slaves run away from a farm in northern missouri and they went to salem, iowa, and there was a brawl in 1848. The courts eventually accused a group of people of violating the fugitive slave laws and the owner of the slaves was supposed to receive 3000 in civil reimbursement for his loss. He never got a dime of it because the antislavery lawyers harassed him. That was nonviolent but it was resistance of the first order. It was more common than not and that is the real story. Active, legal, and physical resistance. I think you are right. The legal side and the physical side and as you look at those cases, what you find is that the black community was willing to step forward and be a little more aggressive. If you look at the case in boston, it gets things rolling from there. The more i read about different instances, that community deciding they would do what was necessary, i did some research on new jersey and i ran across an incident, he goes past the macedonia baptist church. People come pouring out of the church. They free the individual. Those are the stories that get lost. The legal part, you are absolutely right. For those for whom this strikes home very deeply, they are able to take the risks necessary. Just to emphasize spencers point, the Boston Vigilance Committee in 1854, the federal government got tired of it and they sent troops to enforce they succeeded in taking it back to virginia. It cost the life of a federal marshal. Afterwards, one of the constables involved, he is chasing down another alleged fugitive in massachusetts. He got mobbed. People were angry at him and they wanted to protect the runaway. I love the story. According to one of the reports, one of the leaders says to the crowd, do not kill him. Just abuse him a little bit. That was the last year they had renditions in new england under the federal law. There were no more formal legal cases sending fugitives back to the south after that. The violence was real enough that the slave catchers were scared. Our theme this evening is new directions in the study of the underGround Railroad. If we look at those new directions as pop culture, there are some examples. We have the tv program underground, which is getting close to starting its second season. We have the novel underground. Pretty soon, her face will be on the train dollar bill. Lets hope. How do we continue that story in a pop culture sense . Try to keep it is accurate as we can. Literary license is an important part of pop culture and in order to make it palatable and interesting, you have to add excitement to make it more exciting. I understand that, and i recognize the need to keep an audience engaged and get sponsors, but our task is to remind people, remind the makers of these films, these are real stories about real people, and to try to camp down the literary license that goes with it. I think it is hard to do. We have to be vigilant and try to at least offer perspectives to visitors and writers so they understand there is a gap between what you see on television, what you read, and what the reality of it is as well. We have to try to figure out a way to make pop culture the gateway into finding out more, learning more. If you are interested in the underground as a tv series, why dont you find more about the Park Services network to freedom . The trouble is, it is usually the endpoint, not the gateway. That is what is so frustrating. I have no problem with fiction. I get frustrated when my students think the fiction is real. Threepart question. Viewing the present and looking toward the future, what new directions as historians and concerned citizens are in should we highlight concerning the underGround Railroad regarding engagement, education, preservation . I will start with my connection to the Freedom Center in cincinnati. What made it useful and of interest to me was, it was taking history and beginning to use it as a platform for understanding what individuals can do in terms of trying to affect society. It is an interracial cooperative activity, one of the earliest ones in this country. These individuals are really trying to find ways to help correct the direction of where the country is heading. They see the constitution and declaration of independence as pretty good documents and it would be great if the country adhere to them. It was a personal commitment to redirect the direction of the nation toward a more humanistic, caring approach to how it treats all of its citizens, not just a few. That is sort of what i would see as a larger societal usefulness the underground Railroad Story can have in terms of understanding the impact of a few dedicated longterm workers in the field in terms of trying to affect society of which they are part. Spencer i was on a National Historic trust for preservation. We know who the leaders were of these vigilant networks. He is featured in the show, the underground. We still have a good biography of him. It is amazing. Graham hodges did a biography, but i can name half a dozen other leaders who have never received biographies. Harriet tubman just received her first good biography in years. We need to do a better effort in writing biographies for these individuals. What i would like to see more appreciation about is the role the underGround Railroad played in the coming of the war, and the nature of the war itself. Out here in missouri, we tend to only think about the territorial crisis and how it sparked the war. Where i am from, we think more in terms of the underGround Railroad and fugitives. The territorial crisis and fugitive crisis are critical catalyst. They come hand and glove and affected the politics of the 1850s. Runaway slaves continue to escape throughout the floor and pave the way for emancipation and not everybody understands there is a connection between contraband and fugitives, and they need to come and we need to do a better job on the long story, the long underGround Railroad, and to think about it not just ending in 1861, but continuing through 21865 and beyond. Some of these people to 1865 and beyond. It is a poignant reminder about that. I am also propreservation. [laughter] one of the great things out here, particularly related to runaways during the actual civil war. The records from the American Missionary Society commit these are ministers that are out here, including kansas, but missouri a little bit. They had to send reports every week. These reports are very up front. They are listing 20 runaways from 6111 north. , 61 in leavenworth. We talked at dinner, pre war, cover troops were primarily escaping prisons of color. Particularly around pleasanton and mouth city. It was extremely safe. James montgomery, john Brown Wallace brothers, we can protect you. People from missouri cannot get in here without us knowing it first, so they could just run to the woods, and they did. Then they would come out of the woods and go back to farming, whatever. Montgomery is clear about this in his letters. Nothing to fear. So the they were farming, doing business in mount city. The connections are alive in so many different ways. He was part of john browns the connections are alive in so many different ways. He was part of john browns secret six and i showed my students this picture of emancipation day 1863 in south carolina. They had a celebration, and, went worth is there. That is that connection you are driving in kansas and missouri and alive and well in south carolina. It is not wellknown. The black vigilance efforts and resistance to the fugitive slave law is what gives us spirit and life to the colored troops and the recruitment of black soldiers, and those two things need to be connected in our classrooms. If they know anything about james montgomery, they know thats probably there closes connection, not necessarily his time out here with ground and others. Any final comments before q and a . There is an interesting book out. She calls it the geography of the underGround Railroad. It is a fascinating, different way of understanding how it operated and how information was exchanged. She does a very close study of a community in the midwest, and begins to look at the issues of National Church gatherings, National Gatherings of masons, National Black conventions, and reminds as these individuals were coming together on a regular basis and through those gatherings are exchanging information and creating a network of information and guidance for people who were running away. When you stop to think, it makes a lot of sense, but i dont think it has been studied enough yet. It sparked a different way of understanding how information is exchange and how there are Informal Networks in terms of helping the system operate in ways we had not considered. I think also here, talking at dinner, most people have heard of susan b anthony. Correct . How about her brother . No . He was one of those Union Officers who helped to liberate slaves at the beginning of the war and had been a resistor to the slave power. He is that connection between antebellum and wartime. He got courtmartialed for being too aggressive in freeing slaves. Sarah . Angelina . They had almost a daily correspondence with their wives here in kansas territory. Our connection is almost a national connection. 1848, convention of women, right . 1857, the same women started the Rights Association in kansas. This is how they got connected with the sisters and so on with 1857, the same women started the Rights Association in kansas. This is how they got connected with the sisters and so on with that communication. Ultimately in the last constitution that made kansas free, the right for women to vote was won. Imagine what they could have done with twitter. [laughter] facebook. School board elections, very important. The school board controls education for children. Your questions . The microphone is right there. Is there a consensus number about how many people were blocked via the underGround Railroad from the south to freedom . Roughly the number you hear is about 100,000 over the course of the underGround Railroad. It is hard to verify. I think that is roughly the right number people are talking about now. That is the general consensus. Some people use consensus numbers to extrapolate about 1000 a year. The number of escapees matters far less than the number of stories. What you need to measure is the number of newspaper accounts. It is a propaganda war. The term is a propaganda term and the hold point is to inflame southerners. Almost all of them complained about the lack of federal enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, and it is one of the reasons why we are lurching out of the union, and the abolitionists were happy to drive them to the provocation because they thought of this as a compact with sin. I think it is a mistake to fixate on the actual human traffic as important as that is. It would be more relevant to about the newspaper articles, which were overwhelming. I think you are right. It is a propaganda war that is going on. It is not only southerners, it is also the north. The story southerners are given about slavery not that bad, the fact that people were grilling to run away and risk of this and travel around and speak about what slavery is like is important for the north because it gives them a different perspective on the institution of slavery and how it truly functions as opposed to the propaganda from the south. What you will see is a real push especially for women in the north to identify with slave women in the plight they face in the south on a rigor basis and understand this is a system that exploits them and you need to think about how you would feel for your own daughter or Family Member going through the same thing, so it is a twoway propaganda story. One footnote on the numbers issue, so we have records from boston, new york vigilance operations and other records. We can document about 3000 escapes with contemporary records. That does not mean those were all the escapes that occurred, but that is how much we can document using records. To me, that is amazing and i am happy to explore it. I dont think it has been totally explored. If you look at the perspective of canadian immigration records, what to do know from that . So there are under 25,000 blocks in canada and not all of them are fugitive slaves. There are probably 5000 to 8000 blacks who left the United States during the antebellum period and were living in canada. There were 12,000 blacks who moved to ohio. 250,000 free blacks living in the north, so some times there is a misplaced emphasis on canada to understand slave traffic. What i say to my students, one last thing, lets just say we used 100,000 people number, how many enslaved people are any net states of the civil war . 4 million. What percentage of 4 million is 100,000 . It is nothing. It is about the conversation in the propaganda that is the real issue. It is not the numbers, but what it represents. What you think has brought this all to the fore with you speaking on this subject today and the star having an article on the underGround Railroad today and the New York Times having several articles on the underGround Railroad this weekend . Their whole travel section was on the underGround Railroad. New york, ripley, ohio, etc. What has sparked this interest that it all came to fruition this weekend . Their whole travel section was on the underGround Railroad. New york, ripley, ohio, etc. What has sparked this interest that it all came to fruition this weekend . You want to speak to it . Next week, the National Park service, that all happens next week, so it is a huge opening. Not just for Harriet Tubman, but to showed she is part of a larger story, and that is important for people to realize. Everybody hears about Harriet Tubman, but there are smaller stories. I did not know about the fugitive slaves going to florida to be free. Right, that was a great story in the New York Times. In 1990 eight, congress adopted this legislation that sparked work at the state and local level, a lot of the Popular Culture is following up on this renewed interest. History month, a lot of attention in that sense, but the Park Services deserve a lot of credit for driving the story forward. I think it has become a subject of popular interest. And i say, as i said earlier, there is always the mystery, the myth, but again going back to the cultural question, now the television programs, those are all wonderful things to keep the subject in the news. I think it has always been a fascinating subject. Yes, i had a question. I was reading one of your articles [laughter] was it you said Frederick Douglass had a mixed opinion about the underGround Railroad or downplay that . How would you better describe that . It is an important question. In 1845 when douglass published his narrative, he was grateful to the vigilance leaders and the underGround Railroad, but warned supporters they were turning it into an upper Ground Railroad biting to open with their propaganda. What he was uncertain of his weather they should publicize this. After the 1850 law was adopted, he got radicalized. This is from a former a man who used to worry about being discreet. Now he is out on the public stage urging them to strike back with violence against kidnappers. He was in flux about his opinion of the underGround Railroad. He got more radicalized. So this is all very interesting. Me being a nonhistorian, what have we learned from this when we fastforward 100 years and look at the 1960s and the turbulence of the 1960s and the black panthers, healy newton, malcolm x, Martin Luther king . What have we learned from the underGround Railroad 100 previous that we learn now and what will we see from the underGround Railroad in the future . Well, i think it speaks to both our civil rights movements and both are interested in having this country live up to its pronouncements and key documents that are at its foundation. It speaks to the importance of people of goodwill, dedication to change, working collaboratively to upgrade that change and understand there are sacrifices that go with that, but if the cause is appropriate, the sacrifices are important to do to create the change itself. You would concede that in the underGround Railroad that they have their splints between militants and moderates. Absolutely. There was the black nationalist element of the underGround Railroad, people like martin delaney, and so in that sense all movements splinter. They have factions. There is always a battle between moderates. If you want to understand american politics, you have to understand american federalism and state resistance and federal laws. What was the greatest law was state resistance in the south, and it is hard to overcome. State resistance is a powerful force and the underGround Railroad demonstrates that. The person that ask a question just before me jumped clear to the 1960s, and i know my question will jump from one. The underGround Railroad, but nicodemus, kansas, how much did the underGround Railroad have to do with the formation of nicodemus . And were there other areas in the country that did something similar than what happened in nicodemus . Fortunately we have a scholar who wrote his dissertation about the country that did something similar than what happened in nicodemus . Fortunately we have a scholar who wrote his dissertation about this. [laughter] sometimes the great migration after the war, where nicodemus probably gets its largest population increase. There are pockets around clinton lake, in Douglas County i have to get my county correct, and stuff like that. But even len county down around mount city, where some of that remains. Not today, but remains at that point to it when i started my research, there were still three cabins on the Campbell Family farm that were residences of people escaping through three generations in the late 1990s. Unfortunately those cabins no longer exist because they have been bulldozed over, so there are still pockets of stuff. Part of that great migration during the reconstruction period i think the only connection you might stretch is the idea of people unhappy with her circumstances, especially after the war, having Great Expectations from the reconstruction and finding out it was not what they expected, creating a bubble in some ways where they can live a life that had greater freedom to it and a chance to prosper. Particularly the tenant farming and sharecropping. Not quite as well as they were led to believe. They are coming out of the civil war when they are asking the one thing you want. They asked for land. If you give us land, we control our fate. They do not give them the land. So if they come here, they can actually own the land. Other questions . I have a technical question. You talk about searching the internet for all this information, and i am assuming that somebody goes through record somewhere and has to manually put all this into the system somewhere, and who does this, what is the motivation, and how much is out there that is still there to be discovered . His name is steve in the basement. So for example, anybody can look at the chronicling america site that the library of congress has created, a digitization for americas newspapers and it is free. They have an arsenal of staff and equipment that digitizes newspapers from across the country. It is incredibly viable and all free. Most of my students work with subscription databases that arent free, but they are incredibly useful. They make a profit by selling subscriptions. Then there are projects like the one i needed to consent where my students go out and try to digitize records, documents, annotate them, and all of what we put online is free. We created a whole web Research Guide to the underGround Railroad that links to articles, cases, the vigilance records that are digitized, so if you go to my house divided project and look at my civil war class under our underGround Railroad Research Guide, you can get access to literally hundreds of sources of information for free. I have to admit we are relatively shallow and our information from western missouri and the kansas area. This is an area that needs better digitization, but it is a process that is relatively new. We are talking a couple of decades old, and it is not done, and in a couple of decades more, it will be revolutionary. The heinz project . There is a new project, hein is how you spell it. You can get to it for free. I dont know the full title of it. A friend of ours, what is pauls last name . Finkelman. Thank you. It has just become available as he can look up every piece of legislation connected to slavery. Our hope is more and more private companies will feel the work they do should be made available as opposed to try to squeeze it for profit. I will take it from a down here level. Territorial kansas online is a terrific online. But unfortunately it takes money to hire or staff that digitization. The state Historical Society of missouri has done a wonderful job digitizing the major city newspapers. But there is no money to digitize the newspaper itself, the small little towns, there is no money. Let me move forward a couple of decades. The young man who introduced me at the end of this row is in a class with me right now in which we are creating a permanent exhibit. Park was one of the first colleges to accept japaneseamerican students from the concentration camps. We have 1300 individual artifacts, just our archives, on it. One person at the end of that row is beginning to digitization project. This will be a class project probably for 10 years. So we go from the companies that do it to the library of congress to the National Archives down to miniscule, little places that have no money, limited staff to get the material available to you. That is why we are doing this. So, again, it goes from large to almost nobody being able to do it. As you know, newspapers dont last forever. They become brittle. Wonderful question, because digitization will make it accessible. It is just about getting it digitize. The missouri freedom project. The st. Louis Circuit Court digitized decisions and suits. You can look address gods mark markok at dredd scotts made on the suit from 1846. At dread scotts marquis made on the suit from 1846. Test marks marks made on the suit from 1846. Any more questions . Lets thank our guests. [applause] they will be happy to talk with some of you in the audience. Thank you for being with us this evening, and safe drive home. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer you are watching American History tv, 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan 3. Cspan us on twitter history for information on her schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. Q a, davidk on mccullough on his book the american spirit, a selection of the speeches going back to 1989. The 20th century senator that has been written about as joe mccarthy or yet there is no biography about the senator would have the backbone to stand up to him first, Margaret Chase smith. Do y remember how you went about that. For that speechou . Ive ever worked on anything ive ever delivered from a podium. David mccullough on his book the american spirit, a selection of his speec hes, tonight at 8 00 p. M. On cspans q a. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. Cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And if brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. On lectures in history, Providence College professor Jeffrey Johnson teaches a class about the 1916 bombing of a parade in San Francisco that killed 10 and wounded 40. The bombing took place on preparedness day organized to keep people vigilant in case the u. S. Entered world war i. The attack remains the worst act of terrorism in San Francisco history. His class is about 50 minutes