BackStory

The following is a list of sources used or consulted in the making of the BackStory episode “Thenceforward and Forever Free: The Emancipation Proclamation,” broadcast in September 2012. You can listen to the entire episode here.

Mentioned on the Show:

• The Emancipation Proclamation

• “Emancipation Nation”: Video of a panel discussion with Ed Ayers, Christy Coleman, Eric Foner, Gary Gallagher, and Thavolia Glymph that took place on September 17, 2012

• Wikicommons image of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.

• Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America by Kirk Savage

• American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era by David Blight

• “Fear of a Black President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Library of Congress collection “Voices from the Days of Slavery” (audio, transcripts, and more)

Outside Links:

• Visualizing Emancipation: An online resource that compiles documentary evidence pertaining to how slavery disintegrated during the Civil War

•  “Lincoln’s Great Gamble” by Richard Striner, a New York Times “Disunion” piece on the Emancipation Proclamation

• “Lincoln’s Letter to the Editor” by Paul Finkelman, a New York Times “Disunion” piece on Lincoln’s response to Republican editor Horace Greeley’s open letter criticizing the president’s stance on ending slavery

• “Lincoln’s Panama Plan” by Rick Beard, a New York Times “Disunion” piece on a proposal to recolonize freed slaves to a tract of land in Panama

•  ”Liberty is a Slow Fruit,” Louis P. Masur writing on Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in the current issue of The American Scholar

• Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

• Ta-Nehisi Coates’s beautiful blog posts about visiting Civil War battle sites in Virginia

Bibliography:

• Berlin, Ira. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom. New York: The New Press, 1998.

• Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

• McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States). New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

• Oakes, James. Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

• Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Anti-Slavery Politics. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.

• Slotkin, Richard. The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution. New York: Liveright, 2012.

• Vorenberg, Michael. The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010.

• Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.