Heather Cox Richardson
speaker
7,479 appearances
87 recordings
10 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 4d ago
Heather Cox Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 86 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 26.
Appearances
But white Virginians and white folks in neighboring southern states remained frightened.
podcast-host
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.
podcast-host
And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways.
podcast-host
They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing, and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.
podcast-host
And states across the South pass laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.
podcast-host
Denying enslaved black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation.
podcast-host
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.
podcast-host
Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project.
podcast-host
Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshalled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.
podcast-host
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.
podcast-host
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.
podcast-host
In eighteen fifty nine, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to Hammond's mudsill theory assumed that labor and education are incompatible and any practical combination of them impossible.
podcast-host
According to that theory, the education of laborers is not only useless but pernicious and dangerous.
podcast-host
Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges, but rather were the heart of the economy.
podcast-host
The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.
podcast-host
He tied the political vision of the framers to this economic vision.
podcast-host
In order to prosper, he argued, men needed book learning, and he called for universal education.
podcast-host
An educated community, he said, will be alike independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings.
podcast-host
When they were in control of the federal government in the eighteen sixties, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education.
podcast-host
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor black and white Americans, apportioning money according to illiteracy rates.
podcast-host
Showing 1861–1880 of 7,479 · page 94 of 374
← Previous
Next →