Institutional roles that should rise above their policy differences. At 8 00 p. M. Ght eastern on cspans q a. Next, Smithsonian Institution secretary lonnie bunch and Philanthropist David Rubenstein discuss the central role of slavery in antebellum washington, d. C. At historic st. Johns church across Lafayette Square from the white house. The White House Historical association in hosted this event in recognition of their new initiative, slavery in the president s neighborhood. Quite please welcome the ,irector of st. Johns Church Reverend fisher. [applause] welcome. Good evening. Im the director st. Johns church. I am thrilled our friends at the White House Historicals associate association asked us to have tonights conversation. I will first share little bit about the history of this historic room tonight. This church was completed in 1816. The architect was Benjamin Henry and not only did he design this church but he was working on rebuilding the white house after it was destroyed b
Far but so paul revere and William Dawes and another rider from concord, they meet up on the road and this rider goes to concord, tells his brother and then the network just spreads. And its theres hundreds of riders by the end. Its just like gossip or anything, it just spreads. And it even reaches a little camp, a hunting camp in central kentucky, and they decide to name the camp after the first shot at lexington and that is lexington, kentucky. It takes weeks to get there but it only takes days to get down to new york and i dont remember the exact time. It might be within a day or two. But all the way down to georgia, within a couple of weeks, everyone pretty much knows about the first shot. So paul revere, he helped get started but William Dawes kind of goes home after the british capture paul revere but the Network Continues from concord on. So its really the people of concord [indiscernible] derek theres actually a poem about William Dawes that makes fun of the fact that longfello
Elusive, vast problem of memory and usable past. We have been talking about that for nearly two days already, havent we . I dont know if lois is still in the room. She is probably speaking down the hall. What an amazing talk that was for it what a beautifully written talk that was. I have to bring lois to yell in april and to yale in april into this again. I started last night with James Baldwin and i will do it again. Baldwin in his most famous publication, his most famous long essay said to accept ones past, ones history, is not the same thing as drowning in it. It is learning how to use it. An inventive and invented past can never be used. It cracks, crumbles under the pressures of life like play in a season of drought. When in doubt, you have to quote the poets. Learning how to use it. But not drown in it. Is that what we do with the past . Is that how you view the past . That what it means to have a sense of history . Whether that sense of the past and sense of history begins with
Welcome, and thank you for coming to the roundtable, with the unwieldy and yet highly evocative title drugs, alcohol, and the gendered and racial experience of addiction in the early republic. I am carolyn eastman, and im pleased to inform you that the subject of this roundtable proved evocative enough that cspan is filming us right now. A fact that gives me an additional opportunity to remind my excellent panelists that they should be recruiting their time it. I was working on a book about a celebrity or writer of the very century, who among other cultural qualities, suffered from addiction to opium. He blamed it all on his many years of School Teaching in virginia, which i think we can all appreciate that. He wrote that there is a disheartening and monotonous drudgery in teaching that silently but fatally saps his constitution, big numbs his faculties, and converts the fuel of enthusiasm into melancholy. Opium was the solution, and who can disagree . In writing about his laudanum hab