Test test captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 of the story of the American Revolution and the nation. Im interested in these questions of who gets included and ignored in textbooks. Who is honored with monuments and public commemorations and belongs in this country and this countrys story and who does not. Who can claim to be a citizen, a patriot, hero, an american. Increasingly, especially since the last president ial election, americans seem to be discussing these sorts of issues more publicly and with more passion than used to be the case. As we listen to increasingly vocal White Supremacists claiming they want to take our country back, fellow citizens wanting to keep certain people out of the United States based on religion or culture and as we face violent public confrontations over what statutes and monuments represent and which should be torn down, reinterpreted or replaced, i cant help but feel the first martyr of liberty and other works like it are coming out at the right time. We are currently facing a crisis of historical understanding and national identity. I certainly dont claim to have clear answers on how we should proceed but i argue that the broader American Public would be very well served to consult the work that professional historians do in order to have informed and civil public conversations and debates over what america means and who belongs in this country and in this countrys story. Thank you very much. Im very happy to take questions or listen to comments you might have. Theres a microphone on the side. They would like you to come to the mic in order to make any points that you have or ask any questions. This may sound strange, but when i was in the fifth grade, which would have been 1960, so when it was the microphone, please. In 1960 i was in the fifth grade and he was just a little footnote in our history book, included in the history books, and our teacher, who was relatively young at the time about 28, because we all thought she was an old maid, but she led a little discussion afterwards about the conflict between dying for the American Revolution and slavery still continuing so long afterwards. Was that a complete anomaly . Well, you know, im not sure. In my research, because ive covered roughly 250 years of history and had to do some superficial looking i didnt look at every single American History textbook during the 20th century. I looked at sort of a wide variety of places like Columbia Teachers College that has a nase collecti a nice repository around the country. The textbook in 1963, mentioning attucks. Your experience, i doubt it was unique, but it was right around that time. I would be surprised to find any during the early 1950s. Thats great to hear it was a little bit earlier and great your teacher, you know, took advantage of that to have that conversation. In 1960 that i think was a pretty unusual circumstance. Thank you. Yeah. Fascinating and splen did talk. Going to try to not touch this with my actual hand. I was very struck by the descriptions of attucks leading the mob in john adams account and in the woman who didnt want the bridge named after him account. In those accounts positioning him as a leader, it was used to discredit the mob. Right. But adams is pretty close to the historical moment and even with his defense attorney rationales for wanting to do that, i guess i would like to hear you talk some about that notion of him as a leader of a largely white mob and whether you think of that as another fiction about him or something that there seems to be some historical evidence for and if so what you make of it . Yeah. Thanks. Thats a good question. You know, a lot of it comes down to what do we mean by a leader . That can have a lot of different meanings and contents. In terms of the evidence about attucks participation in that mob, there are a number of eyewitness testimonies that make it cheer that he was not an innocent bystander. He was noted as coming up corn hill toward the custom house on king street. He was holding two big clubs and gave one to another person Patrick Keaton who testified to this and said come on, lets go get them and he was obviously very vocal and several witnesses had him shouting at the troops, daring them to fire, and so on. He was at the front of the mob, right in front of the british soldiers and one witness and only one witness placed him as an individual who actually used the club he was holding to strike at a british soldier. Some people question that witnesss credibility, but it suggests he was not an innocent bystander. Was he a leader . People coming into that area, we have an unclear understanding of what really happened that night in the first place, how many people were in the streets. Some people said 40 or 50, some people said 200 or 300. I have the sense that there were probably at least 100 people there and attucks was not leaning against the lamp post off in the background somewhere. He was up in the front. Being very vocal. He can be described as a leader. But that doesnt really get his mindset, his motivations. Maybe this guy keep in mind, in 1770, no one was talking about independence. There was no way that they desired to separate from the bish empire and declare the american nation to be a new and distinctive country without a monarch. Maybe sam adams and a couple people, but nobody was really thinking about that. Were inscribing these ideals of patriotism on to attucks in a historical way. That wasnt part of the conversation at that time. These folks in boston who were trying to yadgy tate against th British Empire when they started to commemorate the event, their goals still werent really to separate from the British Empire but to call attention to british abuses in order to sort of substantiate the american case for having some kind of remediation i guess from the empire. Was he a leader . One could make that argument, but its really hard to get to his motivations, his mindset and so on. I dont know if that fully answers your question. The other [ inaudible ] if he is a leader does that mean that [ inaudible ]. Yeah. Again, the question was, if he is a leader in that context, can we consider the white people in that crowd to have been following him as a leader . Again, thats very difficult to measure. We dont have any evidence after the fact. When the massacre martyrs are conmem rated a dozen years after, theyre rarely mentioned by name is never is any one of them really singled out as someone to hold up as a hero. Some of the things that people put into their textbooks or into their biographies or arguments about attucks role that he was an inspiration to black and white revolutionaries after the fact, theres no evidence to support that. Again, its hard to get into the mindset of those people, but the depositions that were taken, i dont most of the people didnt know who he was, i dont think most people saw themselves as following him. People in this mob were coming from a lot of Different Directions. He was said to have led 20 to 30 people up the hill, but people were coming from Different Directions who were following someone else or following the sound of the church bells or what have you. Hard to say. I have two comments or questions perhaps. One, you mentioned some other black leaders, not turner, and you mentioned job brown. You forget to mention the ladies. You dont mention harriet tubman. It seems to me theres a few people there i know a lot of people have remained nameless throughout history but might have been a nice point. Anyway, the second thing is there has been a book published about john adams and about his as a lawyer representing the british soldiers and winning for them and i havent read it because i have it on order from my library, but i thought one should read your book and that book that they might make an interesting contrast, dichotomy. Would you suggest or say that might be a good idea . I think that everyone should buy my book. And the book on john adams and make that comparison. Do you know who the author is off hand . I cant remember, but hes been on several talk shows and there have been articles and reviews of his book in say the boston globe and new york times. And i havent read it either. I have to look for that. Unfortunately im old and poor and had to order it from the library. Libraries are great. Im a big fan. Thank you. In terms of women, yeah, i didnt mention women. Certainly when im talking about my focus is on Crispus Attucks. Its important to note that he was not the only person used by africanamerican spokespersons trying to reorient or reconstruct the central narrative of American History and they did use people like tubman and over the years others, Mary Church Terrel and mary Mccloud Boone and on through the decades in order to try to inscribe africanamerican contributions to the construction of the american nation. Yeah, i didnt mention them tonight. Dont spend a lot of time talking about either them or Frederick Douglas and others in my book because im using attucks to sort of represent that movement to reorient and recenter the narrative around black contributions. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for a great lecture. My question is, do we know much about the other four in the mob who were killed that day and can we make any inference about Crispus Attucks biography from knowledge of the other four . I really havent looked too much into the biography of those other four. Again, my focus is on attucks and im trying to cover a quarter of a millennium here so i had to keep from keep the blinders on in a certain respect. What thing i do in the first chapter, though we cant really reconstruct the biography of Crispus Attucks, i try to use other historians work in the 18th century atlantic world, the world of sailors and seaports to try goat a sense of what kind of possibilities there were for Crispus Attucks. One of the other victims was also a sailor and the others were young people, apprentices, leather turners, ivory workers, so there was we can look at that crowd and see that there were a lot of younger people in there, especially among the victims. There were a lot of people who were certainly of the working classes. There were many towns people of various social levels, a lot of them upper folks out there on the streets and some of them did get wounded. Most of them to my knowledge were not at the forefront. It seemed to be again, that sort of helps feed into adams characterization of this rebel out in the streets making trouble. I dont have a lot of information about the biographies of others. Thats one of the fascinating things is that, you know, the reason that the stories about Crispus Attucks are so prominent is because he became a useful symbol in black abolitionists work to advance their own agendas for pursuing Citizenship Rights for themselves and the abolition of slavery. The others werent really utilized in that way by other constituencies. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation. I have a question, actually twopart question related. The first would be, what if Crispus Attucks was, indeed, not enslaved . Which is one question. Because you use the term lightly and, you know, i dont think it is a given that he was, indeed, a slave. Secondly, when nel does his work on patriots in the 1850s, he includeses a good deal of information on the Indigenous People and their participation in the revolutionary struggle, so my question becomes, what is the significance of the erasing or obliterating the complexity of who he was an individual in making him only a black man. Nel doesnt use the term black, he used the term colored because colored includes africanamericans, ethiopians, Indigenous People, all the other terminology used at that time. I would like to ask you, does anything change if attucks is, indeed, a free person of color and not a slave . Thats an interesting question, yeah. Again, it is part of the speculation. Theres a lot of good circumstantial evidence. There was a runway advertisement published in 1750, youre probably aware of this, that identifies a i cant quote the exact language here a runaway slave named crispus from framingham whos of 62, well built, and then in 1770, we have a newspaper account of the victim of the boston massacre as a man he was initially identified as a man named Michael Johnson and theres some you can speculate about whether that was an alias or a misidentification. Hes identified as a man named crispus, over 6 feet tall, substantially built man from framingham. To me, thats a very strong circumstantial connection were talking about the same man. It is not ironclad, absolutely. Does it change the narrative if, indeed, he was not an enslaved man . In fact, nel and the other black abolitionists who were using attucks in their activism, i dont believe nel was aware of that runaway ad until about 1860. In his research and in his construction of attucks, he starts writing about attucks, hes certainly aware of attucks by 1839. Hes commune kagt in 1841, writing letters with wendell phillips, a white abolitionist, maybe something of a mentor to nel in some ways, about his research in the biography of attucks. Through the 1840s, his first writings about attucks are in the late 1840s and then into the early 1850s, he does not identify i might be wrong i dont think he identifies attucks as someone who had been enslaved. Thats sort of left open saying that attucks was of and with the mob. I dont think it would have made a difference because the identify as someone who was a selfliberated former slave was not really part of the narrative that nel started to construct in the 1840s. Does that make sense . Of course. But the advertisement that youre referring to from 1750 does not use the term slave in the notice. Oh. And there is an earlier advertisement for a fugitive named Michael Johnson and some of us would argue that johnson is actually jonar which the top graph fer in boston refuse dudu johnson because his father is prince jonna. If his mother is indeed a free native woman he would not have been born a slave. Yeah. Well, based on the family that most people seem to place him in i wasnt im not familiar with that Michael Johnson ad. I want to talk to you and get that citation. The family that most people place him in was this prince and a woman named nanny. Nanny is identified in most sources as someone who is an indian, descended from a person who was killed in the war, but in the estate of William Brown no of colonel buckminister, now im blanking on which one it is but in the estate when this gentleman dies in 1847 i believe, she is identified as a negro and a slave as part of his estate. So whether she was misidentified or her status as a free or enslaved person is unclear but since she had a value of 80 pounds it seems she was not free and clear free person. She was bonded to this person in some way. The fact that shes identified maybe suggests while she was enslaved and even though shes of native american ancestry, shes by association because of her marriage to a gentleman who was apparently born in africa. Theres so much we dont know about those details of his family life and so on. Im not sure if i missed other parts of your no. Thank you. I did want to know if you thought the narrative changes because it is an appeal to a white audience to argue that the first person to die for American Freedom was an enslaved african. Yeah. And that flattens out this story of attucks. But again, i dont think that was the initial argument nel was making. I think it was an argument this was a person of color, that yeah, he ill have to look more closely at nels full language as to whether he ever uses the term black. But yeah, clearly colored patriots is a broader term. He is clearly seen by black abolitionists as a black man and others. People that pick that up, they identify him clearly as an unequivocally black man. Theres some ambiguity there. You tilted your head. You might want to give me other sources. I dont want to monopolize this, you know, when you have people in the 1850s, we now call africanamerican, using the term colored and when you have nel writing entire chapters on Indigenous People who fought in the revolution, im not so sure that they were ignoring the complexity of who this attucks person was. Okay. Yeah. Im going to stick to my guns on that, though. But its worth thinking about. The term colored, of course theres been an evolution of the way africanamericans are referred to by the Broader Society and the way they refer to themselves. There were considerable debates in the 1830s about whether to in the revolutionary era, the term african was widely embraced so you have the free african society, african methodist epes ka. Church, African Union society in various cities, that term african was embraced by black, freed black communities as they were beginning to form in the aftermath of the revolution. By the 1830s, skreegsly that term colored became adopted by many people who today are called africanamericanss. Famous news paper in new york was called the colored american. Some said we should get rid of any kind of qualifying adjectives at all and refer to ourselves as americans. Those were conversations. The term colored american was or free people of color, those were terms that were widely used by a free black communities in the north in identifying themselves within the american context. Maybe one more question. Well, just to comment on what you said, you said free people of color and in its common usage you hear now people of color. So its kind of interesting that transition. Im looking at the picture, his size he brought along another sailor. And sort of you alluded to it before, but i was just wondering if he did not exist, he was not there, would there still have been the boston massacre . Was he that we dont know. And then i