Sunday, April 5, 2009

Slave Culture - Gilder Lehrmann history podcast

The Gilder Lehrmann Institute for American History promotes the study and love of American History and among their activities are to have lectures and these are recored and published as podcast. The feed of the Gilder Lehrmann Podcast contains the ten last issues, seven of which are about Lincoln, but at the site, more audio can be had.

I was contacted by the institute to review their podcast and to begin I chose the first issue they put out as it was about Slavery. Since I have taken up listening to Forgotten Classics' rereading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, this looked like a pertinent subject.

The lecture is delivered by Philip D. Morgan who has done research into the culture of the slaves themselves. In comparison to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the picture is much more diverse and much less easy to digest. But then again, Stowe's novel was to drive home an ideological point. Morgan attempted to describe, in spite of the problem there are so little sources in which the slaves speaks themselves. Morgan's painted picture is eventually that of a paternalism that gave rise to just as much the justifications of slavery as well as a novel such as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The Gilder Lehrmann podcast promises to be a good quality source for history lectures in the realm of American History.

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2 comments:

Purpleslog said...

This is a better URL for the Podcasts:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p

Anne the Man said...

Is that so? I do not see the difference in the resulting page. Nevertheless I will update the post