America's Monuments | The Trouble With Confed...

In the 1850s, the United States was lurching toward a crisis over slavery -- and abolitionist John Brown stepped into the fray. Brown believed it was his God-given destiny to destroy slavery. His crusade took him from abolitionist meetings in the Northeast, to the Underground Rai ...  Show more

On the night of May 24th, 1856, radical abolitionist John Brown and seven of his followers crept along the banks of Kansas’s Pottawatomie Creek and stormed a proslavery settlement. They dragged five men from their cabins and killed them in cold blood. Soon, Brown’s name was splas ...  Show more

In the United States, questions of how we celebrate – or condemn – leaders in the past have never been more contentious. In 2017, a statue of Robert E. Lee was removed – leading to a race riot and terrorist attack. But in 2020, statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Chri ...  Show more

Confederate statues and symbols are being removed all over the country. This is long overdue for some, while others say that it’s a dangerous effort to erase history. Don speaks with the descendants of a Confederate general whose statue was recently toppled as they come to grips ...  Show more

It’s more than 150 years since the end of the American Civil War. But the replacement of a monument dedicated to the Confederate Commander Robert E Lee with a statue of black icon Henrietta Lacks has proved an emotive issue in Roanoke, Virginia. In a region steeped in the history ...  Show more

Jamil Smith talks with Erin Thompson, professor of art crime and author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments. They discuss why we honor horrible people from the past in metal and stone, what effects these objects have on our present, and what's kee ...  Show more