Our society is engaged in debates about symbols in America, their meaning and public display. Symbols are subjective and their interpretation can be influenced by personal experience. Symbols are especially complicated when they are made in the image of a historical figure. Christopher Columbus is one such case. Is it possible to both publicly laud […]
Join community activists and urban planners as they discuss Boston’s history of redlining and discriminatory housing policies, the complicity of the banks and the real estate industry, and the consequent legacy of segregation and racial wealth disparity. We also identify some specific actions we can take to address the inequities in home ownership. This five-part […]
From the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, dive into four exhibits: Aboard the USS Intrepid; Concorde. A Supersonic Story; On Liberty, Intrepid's Ports of Call During the Vietnam War; and Navy Cakes. The exhibits feature 360 and 2D images, scans of artifacts and documents.
On August 20, 2020, historian Kyla Sommers, author of the dissertation “‘I Believe in the City:’ The Black Freedom Struggle and the 1968 Civil Disturbances in Washington, D.C.,” and Tony Gittens, director of the Washington, DC International Film Festival, who was a student at Howard University in 1968, discussed the similarities and differences between the […]
The one-room country school took rough-hewn pioneers and multilingual immigrants and transformed them into a literate and patriotic new nation. Flag Day originated in a one-room school in Ozaukee County, Wisconsin. This is a short 4-minute documentary that can be viewed free via Vimeo anytime.
Monticello Guide Sam Saunders looks at the life of enslaved personal servant Israel Gillette Jefferson and shares the momentous events in his life, such as the passing of Thomas Jefferson, his subsequent sale and separation from his first wife and children, and his move as a free man to Ohio where he became a deacon […]
In June 2020, members of The Yale Historical Review (YHR) founded The 1701 Project, an initiative on racial injustice and social change. Although unrelated, we draw inspiration from Nikole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues’ examination of slavery’s legacies in The 1619 Project. The 1701 Project (a nod to the year of Yale’s founding) analyzes our university’s […]
Juneteenth is the celebration and commemoration of the freedom in 1865 in Galveston, TX of those who were still enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in and the Civil War was over. This program will bring to light the work toward freedom of the men and women across the U.S. since then and underscore […]
Monticello's Director of African American History Niya Bates discusses the descendants of Monticello's enslaved community and their struggle over generations to make real the promises of the Declaration of Independence.
In honor of Juneteenth, here are a few documents in the American Civil War Museum’s collection associated with emancipation and its celebration, including an illustration from 1877.
Historians Dr. Martha S Jones and Dr. Christopher Bonner investigate with host Liz Covart what the Fourth of July meant for African Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on this podcast.
Slavery is fundamental to the American story. Monticello is simultaneously a place to remember, a place to mourn, and a place to inspire change. How can Monticello’s duality – the pain and beauty of one of America’s best-studied and preserved plantations – advance a national dialogue on race? What is the role of cultural monuments […]