Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
6,928 appearances
79 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 6d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 78 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.
It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts.
Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.
August twenty first, twenty twenty six.
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On august twenty first, eighteen thirty-one, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about seventy of his enslaved and free black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slave holding and the dangers it presented to their own safety.
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Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about sixty of the white men, women, and children they encountered.
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Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.
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State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least two hundred black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner's bid to end enslavement.
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Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.
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But white Virginians and white folks in neighboring southern states remained frightened.
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Turner had been, in their minds, a well treated, educated, enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt.
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And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways.
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They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing, and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.
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And states across the South pass laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.
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Denying enslaved black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation.
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The framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment, the idea that by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society.
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Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project.
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Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshalled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.
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In eighteen fifty eight, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina explained that society needed a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life, that is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.
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But when they organized in the eighteen fifties to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education.
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Showing 1301–1320 of 6,928 · page 66 of 347
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