Richard Bell

"In this sequence of poems, accomplished poet Richard Bell pays homage to his wife of many years, who died of cancer. In doing so, he explores the process of grieving, finding it to be inseparable from memory and, ultimately, from love. Memories and feelings both have a kind of autonomy; they surface unpredictably, according to their own rhythms; they are not in the control of the poet, who observes, suffers, recalls and threads lines together. Yet...

The end of the Civil War brought legalized slavery in the United States to an end, and 3.5 million freed slaves in the South stepped into an uncertain future. Dive into some of the many challenges Americans (white and black, southern and northern) faced in the subsequent years.

Benjamin Franklin's genius is a puzzle. Born the tenth and youngest son of a decidedly humble family of puritan candle-makers in Boston in 1706, Franklin's rise to the front ranks of science, engineering, and invention was as unexpected as it was meteoric. Here is a man with only two years of proper schooling who later received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and St. Andrews as well as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Nobel Prize...

Among runaway slaves, men outnumbered women nearly two to one, but that doesn't mean women played no role in resistance. As this episode will make clear, women practiced several strategies for resistance, critically important because of the prevalence of assault on plantations. A woman named Phibbah provides a fascinating case study.

Martha Ballard's diary records her long, rich life during the revolution and afterwards. Learn about her extensive work as a midwife and expertise with numerous kinds of medical treatments. Follow her hardships during the war, when her husband was accused of loyalism, and take note of what her diary reveals about sexual violence toward women, pre-marital sex, and divorce in the young republic.

Punitive measures by the British following the Boston Tea Party led to the creation of the Continental Congress, an association of insurgents from across the colonies. Observe how the Congress used media coverage, local committees, and a new currency to build a sense of common cause among colonists, transforming a Massachusetts insurgency into an American revolution.

Where were the moral voices among white Europeans speaking out against the heinous system of slavery? The American Quaker community had a long history of antislavery activism, from legal pamphlets to spiritual protests. Learn more about the Quaker community, its views on slavery, and its limitations in the early American economy.

David Walker's words and Nat Turner's actions had a galvanizing effect upon white abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison. See how Garrison and others shifted from an attitude of slow, gradual change to a stance of immediacy. Survey an unprecedented campaign to challenge slaveholders' moral authority in the 1830s.

Learn about the confounding life of Roger Taney, who as a young man turned his back on his family's tobacco plantation and manumitted many of his own slaves. Yet, as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he dramatically expanded the rights of slaveholders through infamous decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sanford.

There is more to fighting slavery than achieving legal liberty, a simple truth that this country's first generation of free black leaders discovered in post-Revolutionary War northern cities. See how the expanding free black population in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere looked for ways to help themselves.