The Film: Interview Transcripts: John Burt

John Burt, Esq., Pittsburgh historian on
government by the people
Both as a lawyer and a historian, the antislavery struggle seems to me to be the most democratic American movement.  Democratic in the Greek sense of that word -- government by the common people -- or as Lincoln says in Gettysburg in that wonderful announcement, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  It’s a movement in which black people and white people, women and men, rich and poor, Protestants, Catholics and Jews, come together to accomplish a major social change.

confluence of three rivers

the second great awakening

Pittsburgh’s cast of characters

the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

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