Dr Michael Ross

speaker

223 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Michael Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Plessy v. Ferguson: The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined Jim Crow · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

So he is doing what the Democrats want.

They want the laws upheld, and they're confident that if it gets to the Supreme Court, they'll win.

Yeah, Torgé is a fascinating figure.

He is a Union Army veteran who has kind of a mixed career in the Civil War.

He gets injured by a carriage as he's retreating at the Battle of Bull Run.

He's later taken as a POW while foraging outside of Murfreesboro.

But after the war, he is a proud carpetbagger.

He's fine with the term as someone who's going to go to the South and try to bring about a new day there.

And he'll be a federal judge during Reconstruction and very pro the aims of Reconstruction.

And he faces throughout his life lots of death threats and threats of violence.

But he is going to, after Reconstruction fails, write a famous novel called A Fool's Errand, a novel about the Reconstruction South, initially published anonymously by one of the fools.

But the book becomes a sensation in the North, sells hundreds of thousands of copies.

People see it as the Uncle Tom's cabin of Reconstruction, and it's people who want to find out what went wrong.

Why did the Republican policy not work?

And Torgers' argument in this novel is essentially that they gave up too quickly.

They put too much faith that just voting rights could bring about change, that they needed massive federal spending for education.

He'll have the ear of James Garfield.

But then Garfield gets assassinated.

And when the time, when the Plessy case comes about, Torje is writing a very influential column in a Chicago newspaper called The Bystander, where he's writing about race relations all the time.

He uses that column to form his own national civil rights organization.

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