We visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where visitors find newly re-interpreted slave quarters and a more historically accurate and nuanced depiction of slave life in 18th century Virginia. We hear from Dennis Pogue, Vice President of Preservation, and curator Susan Schoelwer, who tell us what archaeological research reveals about the enslaved people who worked Washington’s plantation.

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Albany Law School professor Paul Finkelman talks about the practice of kidnapping freemen from the North and sending them South during the 19th century. He also discusses the wide-spread practice of renting slaves and how this tied non-slave owners to the slave system. Paul Finkelman has taught classes and written about the slave trade for many years. This interview took place at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
 

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James Madison, the fourth President of the United States & often referred to as the "Father of the Constitution," owned about a hundred slaves at Montpelier, his 4600- acre estate in Orange County, Virginia.  American History TV traveled 90 miles south of the nation's capital to learn about an archaeological project investigating the enslaved communities of James Madison's Montpelier.

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Vanderbilt University history professor Richard Blackett tells the stories of fugitive slaves, examining how they used the U.S. Mail to communicate with other slaves and how they planned and executed escapes to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. This event was hosted by Penn State University's Richards Civil War Era Center.

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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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This June marks the 50th Anniversary of two of President John F. Kennedy’s most memorable speeches. On June 10th 1963, JFK delivered the commencement address at American University known as his “Peace Speech.” He called for high-level negotiations with the Soviet Union, a nuclear test ban treaty and an end to the Cold War.  On June 26th 1963, President Kennedy took a harder line in West Berlin, famously stating that as a free man he took pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.” This is a discussion from the Kennedy Presidential Library about the significance and lasting influence of these two addresses.

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The Battle of Gettysburg took place July 1-3, 1863, in Pennsylvania, as Union forces turned back an invasion of the North by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The Union victory inspired President Abraham Lincoln to call for “a new birth of freedom” in his address a few months later dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg. C-SPAN's American History TV was LIVE on June 30 from Gettysburg National Military Park covering events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the battle, including remarks by scholars such as Harold Holzer, Allen Guelzo, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, as well as your calls and tweets for Civil War Institute Director Peter Carmichael and novelist Jeff Shaara.

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American History TV joined historian Carol Reardon and Col. Tom Vossler to learn the story of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg through a selection of their favorite monuments.

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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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