American History TV visits the Washington, D.C. home of Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave who wrote the influential "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," spoke out for women's rights, and pressed President Abraham Lincoln for the Emancipation Proclamation. Our tour guide is National Park Service Interpretive Ranger Kamal McClarin.

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C-SPAN visited the Old Guard Leather Shop at Ft. Myer in Arlington, Virginia to learn about work on presidential and military horse-drawn funeral caissons, which are prepared according to century-old traditions. We spoke to Eugene Burks, who has worked at the 3rd U.S. Army Infantry Regiment Leather Shop as a saddlemaker since 1981.

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C-SPAN’s Local Content Vehicles take American History TV on the road. Throughout the weekend of May 18-20 we feature the history of Columbia, South Carolina.

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Thousands of colonists rejected the War for American Independence and many fled to the British stronghold of New York City. San Jose State University History Professor Ruma Chopra discusses the situation in the city and the perspective of those who looked upon the British as natural allies in religion, language and blood and thought the violence of rebellion was unnecessary and unlawful.

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American History TV visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to follow historian Charlie Chin as he tells the story of the Chinese in America to a group of college students. This is part one of a three-part series on San Francisco’s Chinatown. This portion of the series was recorded in the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum.
 

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Metropolitan State University professor Douglas Rossinow teaches a class on the Iran-Contra affair, which took place in the mid-1980s during the Reagan Administration. The Iran-Contra affair stems from Reagan administration officials funding the Contras - who were fighting against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua - with money from the sale of arms to Iran. The arms were being sold to Iran in the hope of gaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon - hence the reason the affair is sometimes called as the “arm-for-hostages” scandal. Metropolitan State University is in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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Forty years ago, in May 1973, a U.S. Senate Select Committee began its nationally televised hearings on Watergate. James McCord was one of the five men arrested a year earlier attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. McCord was security director for the 1972 Committee to Re-elect President Nixon, and was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in January 1973. In this portion, Committee Chair Sam Ervin questioned McCord about his January 1973 conversation with Jack Caulfield, a former White House aide.

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Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a former slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. She was part of a pro-Union underground spy ring run by Elizabeth Van Lew, the daughter of a prominent Richmond citizen. In this program, authors Elizabeth Varon and Lois Leveen talk about the life and story of Ms. Bowser, as well as her relationship with Ms. Van Lew. The two authors also discuss how they wrote and researched their books. The event took place at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

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Saul Cornell discusses his book "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America."  He explores the opposing sides of the gun control debate, arguing that both base their opinions on a flawed understanding of the second amendment.

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“Operation Gold” was a 1950s project conducted by the CIA and the British Intelligence Service to tap into Soviet communications by tunneling from West Berlin into East Berlin, Germany. Known as “Operation Stopwatch” by the British, the 1,500 foot tunnel was active for eleven months, and netted about 40,000 hours of East German telephone conversations - even though the KGB knew about the tunnel before it was built. Retired CIA officer Lou Mehrer tells the story of the Berlin Tunnel at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum in West Branch, Iowa.

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