Team Lincoln vs. Team Douglass, July 2021 (Carlisle Sentinel)
The 2023 seminar blog will include daily posts from at least one of our undergraduate interns (Henry Booth, Forbes, Jordan Schucker, or Etsub Taye) plus occasional posts from our faculty and staff and (hopefully) some volunteer contributions from our high school participants. We have 24 students from around the region attending the Knowledge for Freedom seminar this year, and we’re really looking forward to hearing their perspectives on our program and what they’re learning. This 2021 image from the Carlisle Sentinel always strikes me as a wonderful way to capture just how much and how fast student perspectives can change during a program like the Knowledge for Freedom. It shows our culminating activity, the Team Lincoln vs. Team Douglass debates, held on our final day in front of the original lectern from Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. The local newspaper sent a reporter to cover us, and I’ll always remember how nervous I felt beforehand. This was our first attempt at a parliamentary-style team debate with high school participants. They debated a resolution concerning whether Douglass and the radicals had been right that the best way to destroy slavery would have been to attack it boldly straight from the beginning. Team Lincoln tried defending the utility of the president’s more moderate efforts to hold the union coalition together while attacking slavery with caution and sometimes more indirectly than radicals had wanted. The session was getting pretty heated in the back and forth, until one of the students finally blurted out: “It’s all in Oakes, page 211!!!” The moment demonstrated a newfound depth of knowledge and a surprising level of engagement –plus a mature recognition that citing sources is always important. As a history professor, I couldn’t have been prouder.
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