Curated playlist
History of the Southern United States
- Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction eraDisfranchisement after the Reconstruction era describes one of the most deliberate political projects in American history: the systematic stripping of voting rights from Black citizens in the Southern United States, carried out through…
- Robert E. LeeRobert Edward Lee was born on the 19th of January 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into one of the oldest and most storied families in the state. His father was Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, a…
- Plantation complexes in the Southern United StatesPlantation complexes in the Southern United States were not merely grand houses surrounded by fields. They were sprawling, self-contained worlds, built and sustained by the forced labor of enslaved people across nearly three centuries. At…
- Compromise of 1877The Compromise of 1877 resolved one of the most contested presidential elections in American history without a single shot fired. At 4:10 in the morning on the 2nd of March, the President pro tempore of the Senate, Thomas W. Ferry,…
- Confederate States of AmericaOn the 12th of April 1861, artillery shells arced over Charleston Harbor and slammed into the walls of Fort Sumter. The Confederate States of America had existed for barely two months, and it was already at war. What drove eleven Southern…
- Reconstruction eraOn the 14th of April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln died the following morning, and with him went any settled plan for what would come next. The Civil War was barely over. Eleven Confederate states…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- The Birth of a NationThe Birth of a Nation arrived in American theaters in 1915 and immediately changed what cinema could do. D. W. Griffith directed this silent epic, and within weeks it had been screened at the White House, cheered by the entire Supreme…
- Lost Cause of the ConfederacyThe Lost Cause of the Confederacy was not born on a battlefield. It was born in a publisher's office in New York City, where a nervous editor told a Virginian journalist that his manuscript needed a catchier title. The journalist was…
- King CottonKing Cotton was not just a phrase. It was a strategy, a prophecy, and, in the end, a trap that Southern secessionists built for themselves in the years before the American Civil War of 1861-1865. By 1860, the plantations of the American…