President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862. It ordered the emancipation of all slaves in any Confederate state that did not return to the Union by January 1st, 1863. No Confederate states returned, and Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Professor George Forgie discusses the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking on slavery, and the political and legal factors Lincoln considered when issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. This class is from the University of Texas at Austin.

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History professor Susan Schulten discusses the causes of America's Civil War, including President Abraham Lincoln's refusal to allow slavery to expand into new territories. Professor Schulten explains that President Lincoln refused to recognize the Confederacy as legitimate and viewed secession as illegal. This class took place at the University of Denver.

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Button Farm Living History Center is a work-in-progress dedicated to depicting 19th-century slave plantation life. Through their programs and activities they strive to give visitors the experience of working as a slave, and also experiencing the perils of escaping to freedom on the Underground Railroad.  American History TV traveled 30 miles northwest of the nation's Capitol to visit the farm and learn about the non-profit Menare Foundation.

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Lucia Stanton, senior historian at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, has been studying and writing about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved community for more than 30 years. In this program, she argues that the President sometimes treated his slaves as human beings and at other times as property. Using thousands of records kept by the third president, Stanton attempts to imagine what life was like from the point of view of the slaves. She is joined by historian Dianne Swann-Wright to discuss their ongoing oral history project that has collected the stories of over 170 descendants of Monticello’s slaves.

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Virginia Commonwealth University professor Deirdre Condit teaches a class on the history of reproductive law in the U.S. Professor Condit touches on the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, about the prohibited use of contraceptives and the right to marital privacy. The class also examines rights and access to abortion, looking at the 1962 story of actress Sherri Finkbine, who had taken medication she later discovered causes birth defects, prompting her to fly to Sweden for an abortion. Also discussed is the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion case.

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Florida Atlantic University professor Stephen Engle teaches a class on the evolving nature of the Civil War. Among the issues discussed: President Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in the middle of the war -- and to use former slaves as troops – and how these ideas changed the Civil War from a fight to preserve the Union, to one about abolishing slavery, thus altering the nation forever. Florida Atlantic University is in Boca Raton. 
 

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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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Oregon State University professor Christopher McKnight Nichols teaches a class on Post-Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy, focusing on the period between 1989 and 2001. The class looks at military engagements by the United States during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, including Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Haiti and Serbia -- as well as the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia and Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. Oregon State University is in Corvallis.

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Goucher College professor Jean Baker teaches a class on the Civil Right Movement, from Rosa Parks refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The class also engages in a discussion on a book of oral histories by journalist Howell Raines titled, “My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South.” Goucher College is in Baltimore, Maryland. This class is an hour and 15 minutes. 

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