Christina Snyder, “Slavery After the Civil War: How Bondage Persisted in the US and its Territories”

05/22/20 • 23 min

As commonly understood, slavery in the United States officially came to an end with the surrender of the Confederacy and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet various forms of human bondage and forced labor continued across the United States and its territories long after the conclusion of the Civil War and into the twentieth century. In this podcast, historian Christina Snyder from The Pennsylvania State University discusses her work, examining why multiple forms of unfree labor and bondage persisted across the United States long after chattel slavery was abolished. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/christina-snyder-slavery-after-civil-war-how-bondage-persisted/

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Ian Burney, “Presumed Innocent: The Legacy of Erle Stanley Gardner”

Erle Stanley Gardner is best remembered as a best-selling author and the creator of the fictional lawyer Perry Mason, a hard-nosed criminal defense attorney with a penchant for taking on hopeless cases. Mason’s heroic efforts to establish the innocence of his clients—first in novels, then films, radio, and television—captured the imaginations of Americans for four decades. Gardner’s interest in highlighting and reversing miscarriages of justice, however, extended well beyond the realm of fiction into the experiences of real-life defendants. He established “The Court of Last Resort,” a project working on behalf of defendants who had suffered from poor legal representation, misinterpretation of evidence, or the malicious actions of police and prosecutors. In this podcast, Ian Burney, professor of the history of science, technology, and medicine at the University of Manchester, discusses his new book which explores the methods Gardner and his colleagues used to establish the innocence of those wrongly convicted in an era long before the use of DNA evidence, setting precedents for how we think about establishing innocence up to the present moment. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ian-burney-presumed-innocent-legacy-erle-stanley-gardner/

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Simon Middleton, “Changing Forms of Value: The Shift to Paper Money in Eighteenth-Century America”

We tend to think of money as a familiar object that plays a role in our everyday lives. However, when we consider the changing nature of currency in colonial America, money appears differently—as a “social technology for the distribution of value.” Because money allows individuals to represent and share value in direct and visible ways, the transition to the use of paper money in the United States in the eighteenth century supplemented social connections derived from transactions and bolstered economic consumption. In this podcast, historian Simon Middleton from the College of William and Mary discusses how his work participates in interdisciplinary discourses to examine the cultural, legal, and social dimensions of money. His reflections reach into the present moment by considering how the COVID-19 pandemic and previous recessions make us confront the ways that such financial crises are not necessarily a result of a lack of money, but the result of an uneven division and distribution of global value. https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/simon-middleton-changing-forms-of-value-paper-money-18th-century-america/