The world because people look to this nation nearly coming apart, coming back together, having a new birth of freedom and here we are in the 21st century having quite spirited debates. Newspapers,s, the the commentary was focusing in andonfederate statutes peoples deep feeling about the legacy of the civil war, what the civil war meant today and i think students in the classroom and general readers want to know how people feel about these issues. So i got interested with a colleague i worked with for many years and we put together a series. We had a panel called history in the headlines, we get historians to talk about how we wanted to make sure that we were plugged into these larger issues. We put out a book a year on a ofic, it is a burning issue certainly the confederate statues and memorialization when we put it together around a roundtable of scholars in 2017, published in 2019. We wanted to address something that would be contemporary and fresh. Sam, thesed silent statue on the university of north carolina, the protest against it wanting to pull it down, the board of overseers taking the position against removing it, more protests to follow and eventually the sale of it is a really interesting issue. Money being donated for the removal, this, i know happened at vanderbilt as well. You had a confederate memorial hall, they paid for the erecting of the hall when it was determined by the university to remove it a century later, nearly a century later, you pay the people who erected it, who named it for that privilege, so we now have the irony of hundreds of thousands millions of dollars being given to united daughters of the confederates, sons of confederate veterans, other societies which are promoting often the very partisan view that people believe is embodied by some of the statuaries. We discuss was often divided those statuess, erected to honor the dead and military toat were remind people of the caused of which they were directed. We talk about how can we make people understand that many of these statues were not put up in the wake of the war, but they were put up in the 20th century with a rising White Nationalism . And some of them were explicitly erected with signage that very clearly tried to promote a notion of white superiority and connect that to the confederate cause and connect that to the legacy of the american civil war. I will say that i love participating in the roundtable for confederate statues and memorialization and having these dynamic scholars going headtohead. I was quite surprised that now painter was very caught up in electoral fever was so much in favor of local control, yet the public that the public spaces should be controlled by the people in those spaces, in those towns. We are now dealing with the fact that a State Government will pass a law saying that no statues can come down anywhere in this state, that is not allowed which is a blanket kind of tyranny that must be objected to, must be challenged in the courts if not elsewhere. Local meannessat the polities will get into debate, for example in charlottesville, Gary Gallagher was expanding it to us that one statue might be a few feet from another and one might be in a county and the other in a city, and yet they were both within the same jurisdiction therefore there is this debate going on. The idea that each generation would come up with a formula, each generation would come up with an idea, but what they wanted to put up in their community. I was very excited by the idea that several artists had proposed putting up new statues. Therticipated in a forum at museum in louisville kentucky, when they proposed a forum looking at the statue issue they had a very large confederate obelisk in front of the museum which is on the campus of the university of louisville. It has since been removed, but the question is, how can we put honorsthing that not that statue that talks about what led to the statue being put up, what led to a being put down, what led to another statue going up. Richmond is known by its monument avenue and many controversies have surrounded it, i remember when the statue went up in thend controversy was was a good and, was it a bad thing, was a political . And i think the best discussion of that was done by the late absolutely great in his book confederates in the attic, when he looked at these questions of how it was debated locally. Statue an equestrian within africanamerican mounted and with beautiful precision going up in that city. In our particular town of san antonio, we have a statue established by the ubc in travis park in the center and it was the local ubc that wanted to get this common soldier put up and it was on such a high obelisk that when i came here i was not sure what was on top of it. It was something people felt honored the confederate past, honored the White Supremacy value. Disposition of the of the statue, when it was taken down, how it was taken down, where the statues continues to be a matter of debate here in this town, but we also have other great topics to debate like there is a little building downtown called the alamo which a lot of colleagues work on. We are interested in having new interpretations, richer interpretations of these historical legacies. I am here in texas learning more and more about it. Certainly there are White Supremacists who are now pleading victimhood, that they are being a limited. There is a wide variety of language and disguises for this, but i think it is important to say that we have an ethic in our society that is attention, we want equality and we want discriminatedom to , freedom to put ourselves above others, equality of opportunity and as long as the equality of opportunity and speech and employment and a free society is maintained that i think is very powerful, but one we have intimidation, terrorism, in America Today we are fighting a war on terror. We talk about that all the time of the headlines, i wish more headlines would address the terrorism domestically because we are dealing with the fact that our society cannot maintain itself if we have people resorting to intimidation, silencing, and violent. Violence. You can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at cspan. Org cities tour. This is American History tv only on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3 exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Sunday at 8 00 eastern on the presidency, historian douglas friendly discusses Jacqueline Kennedys 10 year legacy of first lady with businessmen and philanthropist david rubenstein, they focus on here preservation and cultural work especially the white house renovation. Watch American History tv sunday on cspan3. Tvthis is American History on cspan3, or each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Todays class is doing a couple of Different Things for us. Im going to tell you about the history of lucretia coffin mott, who was a noted antebellum reformer, one of the most famous women of her day. She was noted because she was an activist in the cause against slavery. She was a famous abolitionist. She opposed indian removal and supported native american rights. She was an attendee at the first Womens Rights Convention and a frequent speaker at womens rights meetings through the 1850s. As she spoke on a number of other causes, major and minor, of her day