[laughter] thank you or ill be performing all week at aei. Lets talk about football and Theodore Roosevelt. Id like to start a statistic. In 1905 come et people died playing football. In 1950, 18 people died playing football. Here but the problem. Confessions, head injuries, controversy about today. The challenge is to football faced a little more than a century ago. Lets go back in time. Theodore roosevelt determined his first Football Game. He was an 18yearold freshman at harvard come university. He got on a trade with a bunch of friends and they went to new haven, connecticut with a watch the second never Football Game played between harvard and el. So in the history of college sports, there are a lot of great rivalry. Michigan has ohio state, alabama has auburn. The Heritage Foundation at the brookings is duchenne. Harvard has el. Thats her number the ivy league isnt not let a conference. In 1876 to play their second never Football Game. The weather was lousy. There was cold. The o
Discusses this in massachusetts for 45 minutes. [applause] thank you. Its an honor to be introduced by a fellow nantucketer both of our kids were educated by them and it is great to see you here in brookline and its wonderful to be in the Coolidge Center theater with this great bookstore and cosponsored with the massachusetts historical society, which has been an institution that has been absolutely essential to my life as a historian. I sometimes sort of feel like ive taken up residence in the archives there, and every book ive done there has been a Central Information that has come from there but among the more so than bunker hill. One of the characters i delve into, the papers are there at what we call the mhs and it is an organization that is essential to anyone that is looking into not just the history of boston, but this country. And the genesis for a bunker hill really goes back to the summer of 1984. My wife and i had just moved to boston fulltime. We were living on prince stre
And thus paralyzing the whole machinery of our government. Captain alfred lee fought at gettysburg and dreaded the prospect of the northern sympathizers with secession, establishing rule over the whole chain of cities, tearing up the railroads, destroying supplies, cutting off reinforcements. As it was, new york city blew up in draft riots 10 days after the battle. If robert lee had been crossing with the army of Northern Virginia, the susquehanna on that day, instead as he was crossing in retreat, that might now have been the army of Northern Virginia, which was called in to restore order in new york city ,com,com ma rather than Union Veterans fresh from their victory at gettysburg. Gettysburg did not end the war in one stroke. But it was decisive in us to restore the sinking morale of the union. To keep at bay the forces that hope that lincoln could be persuaded to revoke emancipation. Decisive enough to make people look back and understand that the confederacy would never be able to
Civil war after appomattox. I am happy to have professor downs join us. [applause] i am going to talk about something that is overlooked in all kinds of narratives which is the importance of doing nothing. When congress came back in december of 1865 for many people it looked like they dont find a solution to address reconstruction until march of 1867. Despite things like the Freedmans Bureau bill and the 14th amendment, this session can seem like and was critiqued at the time as a donothing session precisely because it didnt determine the end of the war. I want to put that on its head and think about why it was so important for them not to establish terms for the end of the war and why doing nothing turned out to mean so much. I was led to this by contemplating the justly celebrated philosopher Jerome Allen Seinfeld known as jerry who said, doing nothing is not as easy as it looks. You have to be careful because the idea of doing anything could easily lead to doing something which woul
Next the director of civil war era studies at Gettysburg College recounts the battle of gettysburg which took place between the union and confederate armies on july 1st to third, eighteen sixtythree and resulted in 50,000 casualties. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the conflict. [applause] thank you to all the members of the Atlanta History Center and to the trustees of the living Selector Fund for making this possible, making possible for me to visit again here in atlanta this beautiful joule of the city, what a pleasure it is to be here especially at the Atlanta History Center so devoted as it is to the study of the history of the city, the state of georgia and the United States. It is great to be back again. I wonder if we could have the lights down a bit because we have some pictures to see. Looking back over 20 years, Alexander Stewart web declared that the battle of gettysburg was and is now throughout the world known to be the waterloo of the rebellion. Certainly alex w