A Historian’s Guide to the 2020 Election

A Historian’s Guide to the 2020 Election

This month I was looking for something to kick off Black History Month, and I was looking for something with a bit of a historical angle. What I found was a super insightful and enlightening episode of a history that I don’t remember learning enough about when I was in school.

It’s also a great opportunity to introduce yet another podcast series (which you know I love to do), this one called The United States of Anxiety from WNYC Studios.

The episode is from September of 2020 (pre the actual election results and the ensuing drama). It provides a view of the time period after the US civil war and how the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments came to be. While listening, our crew also pulled up this timeline on Wikipedia which was a useful reference to have handy.

Suggested discussion questions (if you need something to start the conversation):

• Were you surprised to see how the rights we consider “basic” now had to be gained step by step? And how it took ~4 years for these three amendments to come into existence?

• On the flip side - would any of us would want our constitution changed too easily? Making changes should be hard… otherwise we might lose stability. Thoughts?

• Some folks in our group noted stances/statements made by Lincoln himself may not be acceptable in today’s standards… how much do we need to take these in context with the time period?