American History (Audio)

UCTV's American history feed is made of recordings from university events, and the room changes from one episode to the next. Lectures sit beside classroom sessions, a research-methods talk and a public conversation with a writer. At the 30th annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University, Dean Nelson of the journalism faculty welcomes Jesmyn Ward. Ward talks about hearing people from home written off as foolish for returning after a hurricane and rebuilding. Salvage the Bones, Ward explains, was written for the people who never leave because they do not have the resources to. The advice to writers at the close is plain: improve the work, risk being vulnerable, and keep sending it out until someone says yes. The Lincoln lecture moves at a different pace. Its speaker reads the Second Inaugural Address aloud and sets Lincoln beside Edward Everett, whom the speaker calls the great orator of the 19th century. The speaker also suggests that 'and the war came' was spoken sadly and mournfully, for 620,000 dead. The third paragraph becomes a way into the question: what Lincoln really thought about slavery. Stan Rodriguez, a fellow Triton from the San Isabel Reservation, speaks on Kumeyaay people and place names. Rodriguez recounts how Kumeyaay people fought back against the Spanish missions, burning every mission in Kumeyaay territory, and describes the reducciones system as basically slavery. The talk ends with the meaning of Otay and a joke borrowed from the San Isabel Casino. The UC Berkeley Big Ideas recordings, from the Goldman School of Public Policy, are class sessions from the 2020 election season, scheduling notes and sign-offs included. One follows how the Democratic and Republican parties traded places, from the Confederacy and Radical Reconstruction through the New Deal, the civil rights movement and Barack Obama's election. It has a dry answer for anyone who thinks the Confederates-were-Democrats point settles anything. Another starts from President Trump's remarks on post office funding and mail-in voting, then tests how democratic the Constitution is through slavery, Black labor and an 1823 image of a sugar plantation in Antigua. The UC Merced session on local archives turns from subject to method. Its speaker recalls a first encounter with Ezra Pound's papers, then walks through the Online Archive of California and the campus's own repositories, down to the records of its design and construction. For close reading, start with Lincoln; for San Diego's Indigenous history, the Kumeyaay talk; for the history behind a modern election, the Berkeley classes. The recordings keep the room in, with the jokes, asides and class logistics sitting alongside the argument.