C-SPAN Airs May Symposium,
“Emancipation during the Civil War”

On May 5 and 6, the U.S. Capitol Historical Society held its annual spring symposium on the history of Congress. C-SPAN recorded the proceedings in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and the Capitol Visitor Center and has now broadcast the individual talks on American History TV. They are available in C-SPAN's online archives.

For more information about the symposium, visit the USCHS page announcing the event.

Gary Gallagher (University of Virginia, "'Wherever our Army Has Been, There Remain No Slaves': Union Military Forces in the Equation of Emancipation") kicked off the symposium with a May 5 evening talk; it is archived on C-SPAN's website.

All the May 6 talks are listed on the same page. It includes John Stauffer (Harvard University)'s talk, "The Process and Meaning of Emancipation during the War" and Michael Burlingame (University of Illinois at Springfield) on "Abraham Lincoln: Reluctant Emancipator?" The remaining speakers were Paul Finkelman (Albany Law School, "Constitutionalizing Freedom: Lincoln's Road to Emancipation"), L. Diane Barnes (Youngstown State University and Frederick Douglass Papers, "Frederick Douglass and the Complications of Emancipation"), Kate Masur (Northwestern University, "The Fugitive Slave Crisis in Washington, D.C."), Beverly Palmer (Pomona College, Charles Sumner Correspondance, and Thaddeus Stevens Papers; "Stevens, Sumner, and the Journey to Full Emancipation"), Jenny Wahl (Carleton College, "Double Take: Abolition and the Size of Transferred Property Rights"), and Seymour Drescher (University of Pittsburgh, "People and Legislators: Emancipators in Comparative Perspective")