Fifty years to the day that American U-2 planes photographed startling evidence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, American History TV was live from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston. A gathering of historians, scholars, filmmakers and journalists came together for a 50th anniversary retrospective of the historic 13 days that came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Participants included Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev—President Kennedy’s counterpart in a military and political confrontation that tested the young Kennedy administration and threatened to lead to nuclear war.

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50 years ago on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered an address from the Oval Office on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He stated that "It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

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The Cuban Missile Crisis is the subject of this ten minute Universal Newsreel from October 1962.
 
On October 22nd, 1962 President John F. Kennedy announced the United States had discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba.

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History Professor James Hershberg lectures on the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

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C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles take American History TV on the road. Throughout the weekend of June 15-17 we feature the history of Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Author and professor Jonathan Gill talks about his book “Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America.” To illustrate the scope of the Harlem Renaissance, Professor Gill discusses James Weldon Johnson -- a poet, songwriter, author, educator, diplomat and civil rights activist. This event was hosted by the New York City Bar Association.

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The Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville was fought April 30 to May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Many historians consider the battle to be Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory. Facing a Union Army more than twice the size of his own, Lee divided his forces, sending 27,000 men under “Stonewall” Jackson on a 12-mile march to deliver a flank attack. In this program, we follow two National Park Service historians on a tour as they walk the same ground exactly 150 years after Jackson launched his attack.

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Author Graham Hodges looks at New York City’s cartmen, who hauled goods on one-horse carts and dominated the streets of the city from 1667 to 1850. He talks about how the cartmen developed deep relationships with the merchants and residents of New York City and came to be a part of the civic culture. The cartmen also came to hold political power and can be considered the forerunners of modern labor unions. The Gotham Center for New York City History hosted this event.

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University of Kansas professor Shawn Leigh Alexander teaches a class on the period following the end of slavery to the beginning of segregation. Professor Alexander discusses the failed Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Supreme Court ‘s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and African American journalist Ida B. Wells work to expose the horrors of lynching in the United States. The University of Kansas is in Lawrence.
 

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