Member Fee: $15.00
Non-Member Fee: $15.00
When: 7/16/2025, 10:00 AM–11:30 AM
Where: Penn State Outreach Building, Room 119, 100 Innovation Boulevard University Park, PA 16802
Instructor: William Blair
Course Number: {CourseNum}01
We may think our current situation is unique in featuring partisan bubbles in which people mistrust information from the other side. But immediately after the Civil War, a toxic partisan climate caused racial violence to become politicized, with accounts dismissed as fictions to mask a political agenda. To fight this attitude, military officers led by Ulysses S. Grant mobilized the Freedmen’s Bureau to document crimes against African Americans. They needed hard data to counter the nineteenth-century version of “fake news.” The results fortified efforts to pass the Fourteenth Amendment.
This course is offered in a hybrid format. The course is held in-person at the Outreach Building and broadcast from the classroom online via Zoom. The is the in-person section.
