From Senior Thesis to NPR
It’s every historian’s dream to uncover a little-known, but significant historical event. Daniel Rasmussen, achieved that goal early. As a student at Harvard, he was intrigued by a three-sentence reference to a slave march on New Orleans in 1811 and began investigating it for his senior thesis. It turns out that this was the largest slave revolt in American history. Over 100 of the slaves were killed by local planters who decapitated them, put their heads on pikes and hung their corpses on the gates of the city. Now, Rasmussen has written a book about that story.
In an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered last night (listen to it here), Rasmussen says the fact that we don’t know this story represents “…one of the most significant moments of political amnesia in our nation’s history.” The events were immediately covered up because, “…if the planters acknowledge that slaves are people with real political ideals…it undermines the entire ideology that underlaid slavery.”
Rasmussen wants people to know this “…story of heroism, another side of slave history…What I am trying to do, is not only bring you their story…but to think of these enslaved men and women as people who contributed to American history, who fought and died for their beliefs and who were heroic.”
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