Western Civ20 Mar 2025

Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today

In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ought to be taught, researched, and narrated. But since the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders, abolitionists, judges, scholars, and ordinary citizens have all struggled to explain and understand the peculiar institution.

In Making Sense of Slavery, historian Scott Spillman shows that the study of slavery was a vital catalyst for the broader development of American intellectual life and politics. In contexts ranging from the plantation fields to the university classroom, Americans interpreted slavery and its afterlives through many lenses, shaping the trajectory of disciplines from economics to sociology, from psychology to history. Spillman delves deeply into the archives, and into the pathbreaking work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Annette Gordon-Reed, to trace how generations of Americans have wrestled with the paradox of slavery in a country founded on principles of liberty and equality.

As the debate over the place of slavery in our history rages on, Making Sense of Slavery shows that what is truly central to American history is this very debate itself. 

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Episoder(612)

Episode 559: The Battle of Britain

In the summer of 1940, with continental Europe under Nazi occupation, Great Britain stood alone against the seemingly unstoppable German war machine. This episode chronicles the Battle of Britain, a h...

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Episode 558: NOT Like Last Time

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Episode 557: The First, Second World War

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Episode 556: The Twenty Years' Armistice

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11 Sep 50min

Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia

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8 Sep 56min

Episode 555: Muddling Through

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Western Civ 2.0: The "Antonines"

This is a preview of what you can expect if you subscribe to the Patreon feed. Every once and a while I like to provide one of these. In this episode, I cover the long reign of Antoninus Pius, one of ...

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Episode 554: To The East

I've wanted to move to Asia for a long time. And we're finally getting there. Today we discuss the development of Japan and China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Western Civ 2.0

28 Aug 47min