In spring 2015, Dickinson student Caly McCarthy interviewed her father Joseph McCarthy about his recollections of the city of Washington DC in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination in 1968. The gripping interview also formed the basis…
Category: African American
VIDEO –Interview on Emancipation
Robert Engs (1943-2013) was a leading historian of nineteenth-century America who visited Dickinson College in spring 2008 as a presenter in one of our teacher workshops. While on campus, he offered some insights about how to explain the outlook of former…
VIDEO –Interview on Lincoln’s Racial Views
Here Lincoln scholar Matthew Pinsker offers his views on whether or not Lincoln was a racist and how to explain Lincoln’s views on slavery. These interviews were recorded at Dickinson College in the summer of 2009. The interviewers were two…
VIDEO –Interviews on Dred Scott Case
In 2007, the House Divided Project at Dickinson College hosted a teacher workshop on the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott decision. Historians such as Steven Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) and Lea VanderVelde (University of Iowa College of Law) provided…
VIDEO –Interviews with Underground Railroad Experts
In the summer of 2008, historian Fergus Bordewich (Bound for Canaan) and Harriet Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson (Bound for the Promised Land) visited Dickinson College as part of an NEH workshop on the Underground Railroad. They spoke about the subject in a…
VIDEO –Lectures on Civil War Topics
Catherine Clinton (University of Texas / San Antonio) delivered a powerful lecture about Mary Lincoln on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. Title = “Mary Lincoln’s Assassination” (41 min.) Lectures by Matthew Pinsker Underground Railroad Reconsidered…
MAP –Up From Slavery
This map is built on snippets from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901) and offers a teachable overview of Washington’s life as he transformed himself during Reconstruction into a leading figure in American society. Additional resources for this map can be…
ESSAY –End of Civil War
In 2015, Matthew Pinsker wrote a short essay for the Smithsonian / Zocalo Public Square series, “What It Means To Be American,” on the subject of the debates about civil rights that erupted among abolitionists at the end of the…
REFERENCE–Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad research guide offers a true gateway to online resources on the subject, featuring hundreds of hard-to-find records, documents, images, videos, and other multi-media content. Last updated in 2015. UGRR Research Guide
MAP –Atlantic Slavery
Dickinson students Mary Chobanian, Cory Palmer and Kyle Reese helped create this map built on snippets from David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage (2006), a sobering study of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, for their course in Spring 2012, History 211:…