Overview The nineteenth century had always been an age of certainties, but by the 1890s, some of the post-Civil War consensus about American civilization and progress was beginning to fragment as it had never quite done before. Populists challenged the distribution…
Category: Southern
1860s
Overview When Booker T. Washington recalled the outbreak of the Civil War, he claimed that “every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery.” Washington’s memory of life as young slave…
ESSAY –Emancipation Moments
The essay excerpted below originally appeared in Emancipation at 150: The Impact of Emancipation, a special e-book anthology produced in 2013 on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln’s Cottage and the US Commission on Civil Rights. Emancipation…
ESSAY –Interpreting the Upper-Ground Railroad
The essay excerpted below originally appeared in Max van Balgooy, ed., Interpreting African American History and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 75-88. It argues for a more sophisticated understanding of interpreting Underground Railroad sites, one that emphasizes how open much…
COLLECTION –Slavery and Abolition
The libraries at Dickinson College and Millersville University formed a partnership to digitize more than 24,000 pages of nineteenth-century US pamphlets on slavery and abolition. Slavery & Abolition in the US
EXHIBIT –Remembering America Since 1945
In spring 2015, Dickinson students in History 118 (US Since 1877) conducted oral histories and produced essays with multi-media appendixes (such as podcasts or videos). Several of these extraordinary projects have been featured in this Storify essay summarizing their work.…
VIDEO –Interview on Sherman’s March
In this 2008 interview conducted at Dickinson College, historian Mark Neely was asked whether Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864 and across the Carolinas in 1865 were examples of total war. He denied that they were and tried to…
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 –Confederate Family
The National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania holds a series of remarkable wartime letters from a Texas farmer who served in the Confederate army. William Elisha Stoker described life in the army and openly expressed his concerns about the…