A former fellow of the Virginia Foundation for the humanities. She has written on the Tobacco Industry, the rise of ezbrets and the grassroots fight to battle climate change. Her Research Explores how organized Interest Groups and Everyday Americans influence government policy. And today is day two of the publication of the cigarette. Please welcome sarah milov. [ applause ] thank you so much for being here. Its such a treat and an honor for an historian of the United States to come and speak at the National Archives. The other day, i saw that the twitter account of the National Archives tweeted out information about this event. And i thought, you know, as a historian, it was kind of like having yourself name checked by beyonce. I mean, this is the mohr ship. So thank you all so much for coming. So, my book, the cigarette a political history, seeks to understand tobacco in modern america, not through the lens of big tobacco and the machinations of industry, but through the efforts of Everyday Americans to get the government to intervene on their behalf. Big tobacco is still an important part of this story, but by focusing on other actors, on farmers, on government officials, on politicians, on activists, on workers and labor unions, the story of tobacco in the 20th century begins to look a lot different than if we were to understand it through the actions of big tobacco alone. By taking a wideing anned approach, my book suggests that far from being the product of corporate deception that was ultimately exposed by science, the cigarette was, from seed to smoke, a product of government intervention. And what ultimately reduced tobaccos grip on American Society was not the discovery that smoking causes cancer and of course, the Surgeon Generals warning to that effect, it was the invention by activists of nonsmokers rights. The idea that people who do not smoke were entitled and able to achieve unpolluted air in shared public spaces. This idea that nonsmokers rights, so natural to us today that we dont even consider it, really, to rise to the level of a political claim, that this idea had to be invented and then it had to be vindicated by decisionmaking bodies. Most frequently, these bodies were businesses and local governments. So in the rise of cigarette, we can see a product made by the federal government acting on behalf of privileged constituencies. And in its unmaking, we can see a critique. Not only of cigarette consumption, but in a way of doing government, the smokefilled rooms, as it were, that gave rise to the cigarette in the first place. Today im going to talk about one nonsmokers rights activist, a woman who had a big hand in the kind of smokefree world we live in today. Her story, i think, illuminates the surprising mix of social movement activism, legal innovation, and hardnosed business calculation that remade public space. In 1975, donna shemps morning routine looked rather unusual. The 43yearold Customer Service representative popped an antiamedic pill and drove from her home in southwest new jersey to the brigton office of the Bell Telephone company. There, depending on how things looked inside, she might put on a gas mask, which she would lower when she had to speak by phone or in person with customers. Her model was called the gasfo and it was made by the mine Safety Appliance Company of pittsburgh. It was designed to be used by miners. Now, miners, of course, wear gas masks to protect themselves against toxic airborne pollutants that they encounter on the job. And thats what donna shemp did, as well. More than half of her coworkers smoe smoked and there were no prohibitions on smoking by the customers who came into the office. For shemp, this environment was crippling. Tobacco smoke nauseated her, hence the daily antiamettic. It caused constant headaches and rashes on her face. It caused tearing and eye irritation that left her with corneal abriasions that would nt heal. Now, in shemps office, like most american workplaces in the 1970s, there were no rules separating smokers from non nonsmokers. The company reasoned that rearranging the lawsuit of the office to separate smokers and nonsmokers would disrupt work flow. And the union to which shemp belonged, the communication workers of america, agreed. Smoking was a workplace right. Now, the gas mask was not first remedy that donna shemp turned to for relief. Earlier that year, she had seen a Company Doctor who had told her that it was a disgrace for any employee to have to work in such a smoky space. On his orders, she was not to return to work until her supervisors could find a way to ensure a smokefree environment. Now, donna shemp thought she would be home for a few days as supervisors rearranged the desks at work, but days turned into weeks, which turned into months. And her extended sabbatical signaled the depths of bells unwillingness to implement a nonsmoking policy. But as any academic knows, sabbaticals are the only fulltime when any real work gets done, so donna shemp got to work. Now, donna shemp was no antitobacco activist, but she soon became one. She made contact with the two primary antismoking groups of the era, a. S. H. , action on smoking and health, and g. A. S. P. , group against smoking pollution. She wrote to the new jersey departments of health and labor, she wrote to the Environmental Protection agency and to all the major health voluntary associations. And from her research she learned, she was in uncharted territory. In the 1970s, there were no laws governing workplace smoking on behalf of nonspoerks. Despite the fact that the epa and osha had authority over air quality and workplace conditions, respectively, no Regulatory Agency was authorized to Police Workplace conditions affected by tobacco smoke. Now, for other Workplace Health and safety issues, shemp could expect the support of her union, as unions across the country in the 70s were beginning to venture beyond wages and ours to address the health and quality of life concerns of members. But the communication workers of america was adamant it would not support shemp in her quest for a workfree smoke environment. In fact, her Union Steward smoked throughout the meeting that she had requested to discuss her need for smokefree air. The antipathy toward her at work was palpable, or rather, inhaleable. Now, finding no allies in government or labor, shemp tried to take her case directly to management. She delivered a proposal for a corporate workplace smoking policy to bell headquarters in new york city. Bell should ban smoke, she wrote, in the work areas of business offices, in the same manner that it has banned in the Central Offices and switchboards. And if bell could not bring itself to regulate smoking on behalf of nonsmoking employees, shemp argued, at least it could do so on behalf of the bottom line, citing figures from the Public Health service, shemp pointed out that smokers spent a third more time away from their jobs because of illness than do persons who have never smoked cigarettes. Now, Bell Telephone did not take donna shemps advice. Having exhausted all the normal channels of regular workplace decision making, donna shemp decided that the courtroom would be the only venue that could provide her relief. So she decided to sue. But how . How could a Customer Service representative living in rural new jersey find a lawyer with expertise and Employment Law and perhaps even a sympathy for nonsmokers plight . The answer to this question should warm the hearts of book lovers everywhere. Donna shemp called a librarian. She called the reference librarian at rutgers university. And that librarian just happened to know about a law professor at rutgers who was teaching a course on employment discrimination. Alfred bloomrosen had been a lawyer in the Johnson Administration and an important one, at that. He had been an architect of the equal Employment Opportunity commission, the federal Agency Charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act at work. Bloomrosen was an advocate for the federal governments power to intervene in private workplaces in order to donna sh had a real world need for the legal theory that bloomrosen was developing in his Employment Law class. He agreed to take on her case pro bono. This was donna shimps first stroke of good fortune. The second and third were the enthusiastic and surprisingly so responses she received from two medical doctors to whom she wrote soliciting their support as experts on her behalf. Dr. Luther terry was no ordinary doctor. He had been the Surgeon General who overawe the publication of the famous 1964 report on smoking and health and he agreed to provide an affidavit affirming that tobacco smoke in the workplace could be a Health Hazard to a significant number of workers. Dr. Jesse steinfeld served as nixons Surgeon General, before he was canned, in his opinion, for denouncing the Tobacco Industry too forcefully. He submitted testimony on shimps behalf. The judge presiding over the case was moved by this celebrity testimony but he was also moved by the argument this shimp herself had made to bells corporate brows, that if the switchboard equipment was precious enough to merit a smokefree environment then so too were the bodies of employees themselves. The company should have at least as much concern for human beings. New jersey bell had a common law duty to provide employees a safe and healthy working environment which for donna shimp meant an environment free of tobacco smoke. Now, in resting the right to smokefree air from her employer donna shimp was at the vanguard of a transformation i track in my book. For most of the 20th century the cigarette was not a testament to regulatory neglect, not an abhorrent product. Cigarettes were a testament to federal regulation on behalf of organized tobacco producers. Activists like donna shimp did more than try to create tolerable conditions to work, congregate, dine and exist in public. They asserted an alternative way of thinking about the value of citizenship and the obligations of government. The idea of nonsmokers rights that an individual by virtue of not partaking in a habit can dictate where that habit is expressed, this idea cut against the producercentered politics that undergirded smokers supremacy in shared spaces. Donna shimp soon realized that she was part of a yuoung, but emboldened new social movement, the nonsmokers Rights Movement. Their goal was not to get people to quit smoking but to get people to quit smoking in public. In effect, their intention was to subvert the consentbased paradigm that both the Tobacco Industry and the federal government had used to govern tobacco. This paradigm was in your face every time you picked up a pack of cigarettes. It was right there on the warning label that read, caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. Having been warned it was the Consumers Choice whether or not to smoke. But the majority of americans never did experience cigarettes as smokers. They experienced tobacco smoke as part of shared public space, except for when tobacco smoke may have kept them home. Clara gouan, a housewife in her words, a mother of two young daughters, decided she had had enough of bending her life around tobacco smoke. Her youngest daughter had a tobacco allergy that kept the family from enjoying one of the central pleasures of middle class family life, going out to dinner. So gowan and some girlfriends made a pact of sorts, their First Political action. They would remove ashtrays in their homes, ashtrays that neither they nor their husbands used but were there as a room fixture for the convenience of guests, that this small gesture required premeditation and the kind of confidence that can only be shored up by a group of the like minded suggests a degree of anxiety that gowan faced when she wanted a smoking free space. She started group against smoke and pollution, or gasp, from this action. Using 50 of her, quote, grocery money, she produced a first batch of buttons that would become a standard symbol in the nonsmokers Rights Movement. She also published a news letter called the ventilator which got off the ground thanks to the Prince Georges County tuberculosis and respiratory Disease Association which allowed her to use its mimeograph machine, sharing it with hundreds of state and local affiliates across the United States. So piggy backing on this Associations National scope, gasp quickly reached a big audience. A year after its founding gasp had assembled and mailed over 500 new chapter kits, chief literature that helped fledgling activists conceive of themselves as possessing both a legitimate grievance and the means to do something about it. Now, gasp drew energy from contemporary social movements. At times activists spoke the heady language of civil rights and emancipation. Drawing comparisons between the nonsmokers Rights Movement and the africanamerican freedom struggle. So heres an image of abe lincoln who proclaimed the emancipation of nonsmokers at a 1975 rally that took place at the u. S. Capitol. Nonsmokers are both emancipators and enslaved. Nonsmoking activists reasoned from race, to borrow a phrase from legal history, they were quick to hedge their comparisons, nonsmokers rights activists use of this kind of reasoning frequently flattened the difference between the structural discrimination that africanamericans faced and the crimped choices that nonsmokers contended with. The cofounder of the berkeley chapter of gasp put it this way. Although i would not suggest that nonsmoke es rights are exampled on to the same extent as minority groups, i would suggest certain parallels. After all, he wondered, is there any real difference between saying to a person you cant eat at this lunch counter and saying you cant eat at this lunch counter if you are concerned about your health or if you want to enjoy your lunch. Consciousness raising was yet another tool for increasing nonsmokers sense of grievance, as powerfully expressed by contemporary feminists, consciousness raising brought the hidden i go dignities of private experience out into the open where they could be located in a structural critique of poufr and patriarchy. Not only because some of its earlier participants were women. For a long time many nonsmokers have felt individually annoyed by smoking but have suffered in silence. People are more likely to speak out when they know that others feel the same way. The fact that nonsmokers comprised a majority of the population made speaking out a lower risk proposition than minority activism. But physical suffering itself ennobled the nonsmokers cause, opening up avenues for analogy to the liberation struggles of other oppressed peoples. And, as was suggested by the very name, group against smoke and pollution, the nonsmokers right movement drew energy from the its literature referred to tobacco smoke as air pollution, and human smokestacks, pointing out chemical compounds present in tobacco smoke would fall under the epas regulatory had they been emitted from actual smokestacks. Unbeknownst to donna shimp at the time these activists were beginning to achieve their first successes. By the time the new Jersey Superior Court ruled on donna shimps case, just over 100 cities had passed the first ordinances that restricted where people could smoke, mostly in public buildings. Nonsmokers rights activists had, by the mid70s developed a vocabulary of entitlement and a theory of harm. And they had found venues within the american political system that allowed them to assert what they deemed to be their rights. In inventing the nonsmoker, social activism, not scientific pronouncements, began to clear the air. In fact, substantial ep de wod not emerge until the 1980s. Donna shimp would forge still new roots toward the vindication of nonsmokers rights and they would not run through law and public policy, at least not at first, but through the private sector. After her courtroom victory, not much changed for anybody not named donna shimp. Her ruling applied only to her. And over the next few years, when other nonsmoking employees brought suit against their employers, courts repeatedly failed to rule in their favor. It appeared as though a right to a smokefree Work Environment was an illusory request. Where shimp versus new jersey bell failed as precedent donna shimp was herself determined to change how people worked. Beginning in 1978, with a tireless persistence, and a real kind of public vulnerability, she began an after hours career as a workplace consultant. In the 1970s the field of Management Consulting was not yet a prestigious launching pad for the young and ivy educated and donna shimp jumped right in. She called her business Environmental Associates incorporated. It was dedicated to improving the indoor Work Environment, and her firm aimed to create demand for the services that only it could provide, that is in trying to convince a business to take seriously the issue of workplace smoking and thereby to hire the firm, donna shimp pointed to the legal liabilities created by her case. Notwithstanding the reluctance of other courts to rule in favor of nonsmoking workers, environmental Improvement Associates pointed to the costs arising from potential nonsmoker litigation as a reason for employers to consider voluntarily adopting workplace smoking rules. Shimps case for smokefree workplaces converged on a single argument, smoking and quite often smokers, cost too much, they were bad employees. They destroyed equipment. They took frequent breaks to feed their habit. And they were sidelined with sickness. Shimp had broached this argument in her unsolicited proposal to bell but she would hone it over the upcoming years. Nonsmoking activists did not so much convince employers to take steps to eliminate smoking in the name of health as they convinced them to eliminate smoking employees in the liabilities they created, in the name of the corporate ledger. As shimp wrote to luther terry, is there any better way to interest management in restricting smoking than through the bottom line . The promise of corporate health, not employee health, encouraged businesses to adopt smoking restrictions and bans even when there was no law forcing them to do so. An official government channels adopted this line as well. The introduction to the 1979 Surgeon Generals report argued that stepped up action on cigarettes was necessary because an individual smoking habit implicated every taxpayer. And that cost was steep. Lost productivity, abenseeism put the tally close to 12 billion to 18 billion. Within a decade the Business Case for nonsmoking had begun to bear fruit. The 1987 nationwide Business Survey found that 54 of responding businesses thad adopted workplace smoking restrictions, and 85 had adopted them within the past three years. Such restrictions gathered their own momentum. Workplace smoking restrictions, not only decreased nonsmokers exposure to tobacco, they also create more nonsmokers because they help people quit smoking. Nonsmokers rights activism did not simply clear smokefilled rooms. It created new chambers of power where new tobacco rules were made. The new Jersey Superior Court, the Human Resources departments of large companies, state legislative houses, City Councils and thousands of cities across the United States, all of these places have done more to vindicate the right to smokefree air than the federal government. If donna shimp brought suit today she would find it still to be the case that the epa and osha do not regulate indoor smoking. The patchwork system that exists in this country is a vastly uneven one. Smokers are poorer and less educated than nonsmokers, and poor nonsmokers are more likely to suffer from tobaccorelated disease than nonsmokers with no money. Blue collar workers are in 19 states it is legal to fire or refuse to hire somebody because she smokes. A kind of permission for business that reenforces the existence of an underclass of poor smokers. This, too, is a legacy of the Business Case for nonsmoking. A legacy of the nonsmokers Rights Movement. Just as the physical consequences of smoking could not be contained in just the body of the smoker, the american body politic was forced to reckon with the secondary effects of the smokefilled room. So what can we learn from thinking about the rise and fall of cigarettes in American Life as the product of social movements . Well, for most of the 20th century, the federal government has been hostile to regulating cigarettes on behalf of consumers. There is, in that rather depressing statement tobacco shows is that meaningful action can be taken at the local level, action substantial in its own right and action that can serve as pressure for federal regulation down the road. Whats more, one of the primary levers that nonsmokers pulled on to vindicate their demands for rights were not those of government at all, but of workplaces, of private business. Here, too, we see an opening for activists today. In response to mass shootings, Dicks Sporting Goods stopped all gun sales, and walmart stopped the selling of some ammunition. Equally important, in a parallel drawn more explicitly from the nonsmokers Rights Movement are decisions made by businesses to ban the open carry of guns. Big chains like walmart, cvs and kroger have begun asking customers to refrain from open carry in their stores, even in states where open carry is legal. Small Stores Across america have also taken a page out of the antitobacco playbook, posting stickers with the red dash circle, that circle made famous, of course, by no smoking signs that proclaim no guns allowed. Such tdisplays dont just declae a stores policy as nonsmokers rights activists, such serve as a consciousness tool, entitlement to control public space. A second lesson of the history of the cigarette concerns the unintended consequences of reform. Nonsmokers rights activists operated within constraints and one of those constraints was a political and Economic System that measured the worth of a citizen by his or her cost to the state or employer. Although nonsmokers rights activists like donna shimp began their quest by asserting they had a right to comfort in shared space, the lure of the Business Case was irresistible. Now frequently thought of as a private vice and a private failing, an assessment with unmistakably stigmatizing overtones when you consider that people who smoke tend to be poorer and less educated than those who do not. Activists today continue to find the social cost of disease framing irresistible, especially for the obesity epidemic and the opioid epidemic. Two industrially produced diseases that disproportionately affect people with lower incomes. A healthier society may, in fact, be cheaper in the long run, but the Business Case will not produce justice for those who suffer from the diseases of modern life. Finally, its not possible to talk about tobacco today without talking about vaping. With a stake in juul, we are talking about the Tobacco Industry. When nonsmokers rights activists began to achieve victories through the passage of local ordinances the Tobacco Companies hired their own lobbyists in state houses to thwart them, using preemptive laws, they worked to render these local ordinances less effective by passing weaker laws at the state level. Once passed these laws are difficult to repeal. In part because they tamp down on enthusiasm for grass roots organizing. Many in Public Health consider them the biggest challenge facing antitobacco forces. The vaping industry has shown a similar interest in taking the power to regulate ecigarettes out of the hands of hlocalities and putting them back in stays houses. But the history of tobacco shows the most successful levers of power can also be the most effective. Vigorous assertion of local control over vaping is good for Public Health, and it is good for democracy. The political history of the cigarette suggests that meaningful social change takes a long time. Often decades of work by people and organizations that are overworked, unheralded, maybe even derided in their own time. It also reminds us that activists operate within constraints, and in a world not entirely of their own making. The case for nonsmokers rights was ultimately democratic and at times elitist. A fitting paradox, perhaps, for recasting a product that simultaneously relaxes and stimulates. This history invites our empathy, our imagination, and our courage to imagine a different future. Thank you. [ applause ] id be happy to take questions. Theres microphones on either side. I dont think i need a microphone. I think for the closed captioning, its a good thing to do. Hi, good morning, thank you for being here. Thank you. I wanted to ask you, there was an earlier analogy that was made in terms of civil rights and the rights of nonsmokers in terms of them pressing their agenda. Whats your personal perspective on that, and do you feel that it was a legitimate association, or analogy . I think that given the context of the 1970s, nonsmokers rights activists were in search of a vocabulary that ennobled their cause and the most morally hefty vocabulary and morally resonant activism of the day was of course the africanamerican freedom struggle, the civil Rights Movement. And so they took to that, and they used it. The extent to which i think its legitimate, i suppose that cuts in a couple of directions. First, you know, nonsmokers did feel themselves to be oppressed. That oppression is clearly not the same thing that africanamericans experienced under jim crow. But perhaps it was born out of a similar feeling, that they should be allowed to exist in public spaces that they felt themselves to be exiled from. The kind of sad irony that ends up happening is that in achieving control over a public space, what ends up happening to smokers that they themselves are exiled from, kind of a shared commons, the way that the movement unfolded meant that frequently people who are exiled as smokers tended to be poor and less educated. So i think that they were strategic in their use of that language. And more than just strategic, it resonated with them. But there were unintended class consequences. Yes, thanks for a wonderful presentation. Thank you. I was wondering if your book delves into the marketing aspects. I know that with the juuls that are appealing to children now theres some pushback against the marketing of it, and joe camel, of course, was thought to be too cute for adults. It was thought to be aimed at children. How does the political structure deal with the marketing and the appeal . So at the risk of maybe you not buying my book the marketing of cigarettes is not a primary focus of the book but i have thought a bit about what the history of cigarettes can tell us about whats going on with juul. The Tobacco Industry, like perhaps the ecigarette and juul today, they realized that their product was appealing to young people and what they realized was that most of their customers started when they were children. So it was important to attract young people and there were all sorts of ways that they did so in basically prior to the 1990s. Whats interesting, too, about the lessons of the Tobacco Industry for ecigarette and Vaping Regulations now is in the history of the cigarette you actually see the companies acceding and giving in to certain regulatory demands about marketing in a way that, for example, juul has agreed to basically give up certain marketing practices. For example, in the late 1960s, antitobacco activists basically secured the right to free air time on television to run antitobacco ads, and these were really emotionally powerful, they packed a wallop. This was the first time people had really seen Public Health advertising on tv, and Public Health advertising on tv that dealt with death in a very direct way. And by the late 60s and early 70s these are on television at a tree to one ratio, for every three to back cbacco advertisem one antitobacco advertisement is on television. The Companies Get together and they basically say were out, we dont want to be dogged with this antitobacco advertising so were going to back off of television. Were going to agree to a broadcast band, and they plowed all of that money into other types of advertising. You do see, even when the history of tobacco, Strategic Decisions made on the part of business to give in once activism begins to be successful. And i do wonder what parallels exist in juuls decision to stop marketing. Thank you. Do you talk about, in your book, the complicity of the medical community . Can you explain that, Johns Hopkins ashtrays as an example. Again, at the risk of you not purchasing the book, ill say thats not a primary focus of what i work on. But what i think is fair to say, and whats been really well explored by some other scholars, Robert Proctor in particular has a book evocatively titled golden holocaust, that explores basically the Tobacco Industrys use of what you can think of as scientists for hire. So basically beginning in the 1950s the Tobacco Industry, the major cigarette manufacturers came together and decided that were going to pursue the strategy of creating doubt. And doubt would be the way that they would avoid regulation. And one way they did so was to give money to scientists who were researching either topics unrelated to tobacco, or methods of research that they felt would exonerate the cigarette. And so you do see a large number of not just physicians, but other types of scientists receiving tobacco grant money. And then the Tobacco Industry saying, well, these scientists agree with us. And we sponsor research. Were genuinely interested in finding the answer to the question that was really no longer a question about whether or not cigarettes caused disease. Thank you. Im curious about how individual smokers, or groups of smokers may have responded to this activism. So you about like people get smoke breaks at their jobs now. Can you speak a little bit more to that . Yeah. One thing i did not get to talk about in this presentation, but is an important part of the donna shimp story are the role of unions. And so donna shimps union, and unions for the most part at large, the aflcio is pretty a posed to the assertion of nonsmokers rights because what they see is the ability of an individual worker to subvert the hard won Bargaining Agreement which is supposed to be governing unions have fought for the right of a break at work. What unions represent in a sense, its not a productive use of time. Its not supposed to make you more productive. Its just a habit that you should be able to do because youre a human being, or at least thats kind of the romantic case for smoking on the job. So for a very long time you see resistance by unions to this type of individual activism. Now, what is taking place on the ground is considerably more complex in these kind of highlevel proclamations by the executive committee of unions. The fact now, and the fact then, was, i think, that most smokers do not desire to be smokers. So the notion that nonsmokers rights activism might be countered with smokers rights activism never really materialized, though that was very much the goal of the Tobacco Companies who tried to create these essentially smokers rights groups, astroturfing type of groups. But, you know, by the 70s r , r really by the 1980s and 90s, people dont want to be smokers. It results in fewer people smoking, a greater number of nonsmokers. Thank you. Would you say in looking at things like with the antijuuling, with the e are there Different Actors who are in the forefront of what you like the donna shimp, or that era . Thats a really good question. So i think that, you know, with juul specifically there are many of the same actors. Altria, which is phillip morris, owns a 35 stake. I just read this week that one of juuls ceos stepped down and the ceo is now im sorry, what i meant was the people who are the anti. So people in Public Health that were on by the 1990s and early 2000s on the forefront of antitobacco activism, those institutions continue to be important institutions in opposing juul in the interest of full disclosure one institute that i had a postdock called the center for tobacco controlled research and education, which is essentially for lack of a better term an antitobacco think tank at the university of california san francisco, they have been on the forefront. They were some of the actors in the nonsmokers Rights Movement, a legacy of berkeley gasp chapter. Some of those same actors are now part of this antitobacco think tank that has been very much on the forefront of researching the harms of ecigarette use as well as what the industry itself is doing. Well, if there arent any further questions i would like to thank you for being such a wonderful audience and letting me share my work with you. Youre watching a special edition of American History tv. Tonight, beginning at 8 00 eastern, programs on kent state university, 50 years after the antiwar protests. On may 4th, 1970 demonstrations against the vietnam war led to a deadly confrontation between statutes and the Ohio National guard guard, four students were killed and nine wounded, watch American History tv now and over the weekend on cspan 3. Next, on American History tv, stephanie jonesrogers details her research into southern white women slave holders who she calculates comprised 40 of slave owners in some regions. The previous estimate had been 10 . Shes the author of they were her property, white women as slave owners in the american south. This video is courtesy of the National Archives. Many of their programs can be found on the National Archives youtube channel. Questioning assumptions about history gives us a fresh understanding of our past, digging into primary sources, helps us uncover and listen to the voices of those who havent usually been heard. Todays guest author stephanie jonesrogers has done this in her new book they were her property, white women as slave owners in the american south. Jonesrogers uses an impressive assortment of records to put together the pieces of slave owners and enslaved. Newspaper advertisements, sales records, legal documents, Court Records and more. Two weeks ago here at the National Archives we displayed the d. C. Emancipation act which ended slavery in the district of columbia in 1862. Among the records generated as a result of this law youll find several references to women owners. Teresa sofl and Elizabeth Ringgold sought compensation for freed slaves, with ringgold claiming that perry
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