SchlagerBlog

Over at the Oxford University Press blog, the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written a wonderful piece about Obama’s election to the presidency. (You may have heard Gates read this same piece on NPR yesterday.) Aside from the obvious emotion of the event, I was fascinated by Gates’s words about the Emancipation Proclamation, when on January 1, 1863, “tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign” it. His description about the response of those huddled masses, when news came that Lincoln had indeed signed it, is fascinating.