people in the country know about the underground railroad, was it talked about in newspapers? >> absolutely. there are a number of ways to dig into the subject and fergus is right it's a difficult subject to research because for the most part these people were secretive about what they were up to, with some exceptions like owen lovejoy, but the fact of the matter is, there were numerous accounts of fugitive slaves escaping. there were some sections of newspapers had reward posters, advertisement after advertisement, talking about it, but in addition, newspapers were keen on giving accounts of fugitive slaves who were escaping, a court case that was going on, and full blown abolitionists took the opportunity to insert stories in newspapers of the american anti-slavery society had publications that were, of course, designed to speak solely

to the subject of anti-slavery issues, and many of the people who wrote stories for these kind of journals were very clear about their commitment and their organization with others. so there were a variety of ways who were living in slave states, most of them of course could not read or write, but some fugitive -- some slaves could read and write, and they would sometimes get a hold of newspapers, even on a plantation, and would become aware of the underground railroad that way. >> that addresses my next especially of the south, how would i know about the underground railroad? how would i find my way? >> the fact of the matter is, this is what makes the story so heroic in many ways because many of the fugitive slaves who escaped had only the slightest

idea of how they might get away. now it is true that in those days, unlike today, people, even people who were not literate were very familiar with the stars, so they knew how to find polaris, they knew how to find the north star and they knew at nighttime on a clear night you could head in that direction by finding the north star. many of them knew or became informed of the fact that particularly if you moved into an area like iowa and illinois, and other rivers in the north you could move as i said against the current of the river. to answer your question a bit further, however, there are some wonderful irony in the fact that there are slave stories reported after the civil war that slaves who worked particularly not owners and their

friends complaining about underground railroad operators, sometimes mentioned them by name and the towns they lived in so some occasions slaves planning to escape learned about underground railroad locations or operators that way but for the most part, they took off and were on their own, and much of what happened is that they came upon underground railroad operators by pure chance. yes? >> i'm surprised knox college got to be selected as one of the sites because of the lincoln-douglas debate. i thought they tried to keep their distance from the radicals so i'm just wondering how that came to be. >> sure, when douglas was so instrumental in passing the kansas-nebraska act it backfired in many ways on him and caused him some real problems in illinois. he was concerned about whether or not he would be reelected to

the senate in illinois in '58. so for that reason, douglas was interested in maybe having these debates. on the other hand, abraham lincoln was not very well-known in 1858, and the effect of the debates really catapulted his name and reputation across the nation, so lincoln was interested in having these debates because it would enhance his name and increase familiarity with his name throughout illinois. so in '58, both of them and both of their political allies on both sides decided that these debates would be beneficial to each of them. there were seven debates because there were seven political -- congressional districts in illinois at that time, and when lincoln and douglas come to galesburg, lincoln knew very

well what president ahmat and i know and the knox alums in the room know which is lincoln knew very well about knox college's reputation. he knew he was on very good ground that day and although you must understand there were many, many supporters of douglas in the audience that day, lincoln had a very friendly crowd that day and at one point he turns to douglas and says, "you are blowing out the moral lights around us." you're putting us in the dark if you consider any person to be a slave owner and another person to be a slave. he took a moral stand on the issue of slavery that he had only alluded to in one of the earlier debates briefly, but in galesburg he really put it on moral grounds. he followed up at the sixth debate in quincy with that same moral theme and in alton,

illinois, at the last debate he delivers in my view his most elegant remarks of any of of the seven debates in regard to slavery's immorality. i think we have time maybe for one more question. yes, sir? [ inaudible question ] -- of 1848, he was pretty much against slavery, how much were they involved in the underground railroad? >> they were involved in the underground railroad in parts of pennsylvania and the fact of the matter is that the american anti-slavery society was very aware of what you just mentioned, that many of these german immigrants were opposed to slavery and in fact the american anti-slavery intentionally sent anti-slavery agents hired to lecture for them into parts of pennsylvania with that very idea in mind. well thank you very much.

i've appreciated your attention. [ applause ] you're watching american american >> there's a new website for watch featured video from the regular weekly series as well as access the history tweets, history in the news and social media from facebook, youtube, twitter and four square. follow "american history tv," all weekend, every weekend on

c-span3 and online at cspan.org/history. hosted by our comcast cable partner, c-span's local content vehicle visited many local sites in shreveport. learn more about shreveport all weekend long on american history tv. we're in our doctor's office here and pier in medicine is a long stretch from what it is today. modern medicine as just evolved over a short amount of time. the pioneer medicine stayed stagnant for a while without a whole lot of changes. it was still pretty archaic. some of the things they were still doing early on in this area, they were doing blood-letting, using leaches, doing things that modern medicine has frowned upon but we know some of those have come full circle as well.

but you consider that, the things that we take for granted today when we go to the doctor, things like the instruments being as germ-free as possible or the doctor has washed his hands before he decides to work on us. the tools are sterilized. modern painkillers, anesthetics, a lot of these things were nowhere on the radar for these doctors who were practicing. and we use the term "doctor" loosely when we're talking about early medicine. a lot of these doctors were self-taught or worked under someone else who was self-taught. they were getting ready to retire, so they would just learn as they went. this would be the room that you would come into for possibly a tooth-pulling, if they were going to take tonsils out, if they were going to remove an appendix. if they were going to deliver a baby. if you were going to do an eye exam, you came to the one exam room that they had, warmer weather, better days, people

would sit outside and wait. if it was cold and nasty, middle of winter, everybody could easily be crammed into the exam room with maybe just a sheet pulled across the patient. privacy wasn't that huge of an important thing for them to have to have when you went to the doctor. so other things that make it scary to come to the doctor during this pioneer time is if you look at our exam table we have, the exam table is -- it's all metal. this is a metal exam table. would they sterilize it? no. would there be the clean paper like when you go to the doctor today on the exam table? no. of course we have our mannequin on here but under our mannequin there is actually a groove bent into the center tray of the exam table. and that groove runs into a pan which is basically called the blood pan and the blood groove. if the doctor was, say, removing an appendix, the blood would run around the side of the patient,

under his back, into that groove and then into the pan. and the smaller pan would allow the blood to drip into the larger pan on the floor. once the surgery was done, did they sterilize it? no. bucket of water and a rag. they would wash it over. that would be about as clean as they would get it. the same for their tools. a good doctor would have something similar to this, a wash basin. the soap they used was not anti-bacterial soap. it was basically homemade lye soap. it was better than nothing. they would wash up if they could and start to do their work, but think about it. there's no x-rays. there's nothing to render you unconscious for surgery. nothing to give you for pain, what we would say were really good painkillers. you take our mannequin here and we'll say he was out breaking horses and he got thrown off a horse and he landed wrong.

the unfortunate thing is when he landed he broke his leg. his foot is pointed in the wrong direction, we know it's broken because it's pointed in the wrong direction. we load him up in the wagon. they bring him into the doctor's office, five, seven miles on a rough, bumpy road w him bouncing around in the back of the buck board. they get him to the doctor. the doctor looks at him and gives him his best medical opinion. he goes, "yes, it's broken." and the doctor says, okay, the first thing we have to do is we're going to have to try to get his boots off. our mannequin doesn't have his boots on, but they'd have to remove the boots. thing they would have to do is in order to do that, the first thing they would have to do is rotate the leg back into the right position. that would just entail the doctor rotating the leg back with him screaming and hollering the entire time. something else the doctors would do that they don't do today is

he would ask his buddys that brought him, i'm going to need your help. their job would be to pin him to the table while the doctor did his work. say i was the person who brought him in. my job would be to do this and pin him to the table while the doctor rotated that foot back up into the upright position. the doctor gets ready to take his boot off. and he digs around in his bag. he may just pull his pocket knife out and go to cut the leather on the boot. he may moan and groan and ask the doc not to cut his boots off. why not? simple reason. if may be the only pair of shoes he had. so he would -- the doctor would then have to make the decision, do i cut his boot off or go by his wishes? he goes by his wishes. so the doctor, with the broken leg inside the boot, manages to wrestle the boot loose. when he does, he hears a nice slurpy sound. when it does, basically he gets the boot off. the pants leg is all bloody, there's a bulge sticking out of the side. the boot is full of blood and

the reason for that is because the bone has been exposed to the skin. so the doctor does his best -- remember, no painkillers, no x-ray. and the doctor has to try to set this bone. in the only way he knows how. so the first effort is going to be, he's going to take the heel and the foot and he's going to apply pressure and pull and see if he can pull the bone back under the skin. well, that works somewhat. but it doesn't work as well as it should. so then what is he going to do? he's going to grab the ankle and take his fingers and put pressure on that broken bone and push it back through the hole that it's made through the skin and then push his finger in there so he can feel the bones and he's going to rotate the bone and foot around until he thinks he feels those bones come back together. and at that point, he's going to bandage it up, no plastercast at this time. so what's he going to do? he's going to splint it. and splinting involves two boards.

he would take two boards, one on each side of the leg. the wound would be bound. he would take the two boards, lay them side by side on there and then take some dressings and tightly wrap the board on and that would become the ca. they get him home, within ten days, maybe a little longer, the house starts getting this kind of foul odor to it. buzzing around the wound and they fear -- their biggest fear is maybe it's got infected. of course, an infection was not something you wanted to get on any major ne setting in, they dt have any antibiotics to apply to it or to even give them orally to try to fight the infection. you had to hope your body was strong enough to fight it off. if the infection set in, the cure-all for infection was an amputation. the doctor said, i was afraid it

was going to happen, that it would get infected. why did it get infected? maybe because the doctor had his fingers in the wound. doing whatever he needed to do. but he had to do what he had to do in order to try to save the leg. now the infection's there and the doctor would have to come up above the infected area and remove the leg. and it would generally -- first they would come up maybe midpart of the thigh. they would use something very crude and very -- what we would say very crude. but it would be an amputation kit. the amputation kit would have everything needed to actually remove the limb. and most doctors would be pretty practiced in amputation, especially after the american civil waca had hundreds of thousands of

patients to work on. so amputation was the route to go. so they would take their amputation tools. and the first one that they would have to use would be the scalpel. these are not nice and delicate tools, as you can see. it's long, very narrow, got a very sharp edge on it. the reason for the length is because this blade here would have to be pushed completely through the thigh. through the top and out the bottom. then they would take the bone saw and the bone saw, very small teeth on it. it would be used to like it says saw through the bone and saw as close up to the top as they could. it would cut the bone higher than the flesh would be and they'd fold the flesh back over the shortened bone and stitch that, and that's what would make the stump. so you would think that a lot of patients would die with this type of surgery but it was a very effective surgery done properly. you know, we talk about doctors office, because we have a doctor's office here, but a lot of times like i mentioned earlier these doctors were tenet fo farmers but they were also saddlebag doctors, and saddlebag

doctors were doctors that not only stayed homebound at their doctor's office but they would go out and roam the countryside and go to the small communities. we have a great example of what these saddlebag doctors would carry, not only would they have a saddlebag possibly with amputation kit and surgical kits and whatnot but a great example of a saddlebag doctor's kit that has all the medicines he would have had and needed at the time and you see they're each individually held by leather straps and whatnot, there's vials and the bottles and the bottles lean out so the doctors can gain access to him. the top he would have kept spoons and smaller portions of medicines and whatnot and this would have all been closed up and carried by the doctor on horseback and this would be his medical bag. a lot of the medicines had

cocoa-based, opium based so sometimes they didn't have true medical properties. it just made you feel real good that they were there but locally things that they would use for medicines they would use things like dandelions, great when you were constipated, this he used willow bark so you could scrape it down and use it for an aspirin. a tree called tickle tongue was what they would use prior to doing any dental work, you can suck on it, it makes your mouth go numb. as good as novocain? no, but it was better than nothing. we move to the dental office and the pharmacy. there would be jars and vials of ground up powders and whatnot and he would make his own pills

and his own medicines that way, and of course like i said they used things that would grow natural naturally. some of them actually worked. of them did not. some of those recipes, they didn't call them prescriptions for medicines, called for things poisonous. there's recipes that call, believe it or not, that require you put three dropshemlock in it. it's very poisonous. several that call for crushed up buckeye seeds. well, buckeyes are poisonous. so, the rule of thumb was, a little could cure you and a lot could kill you. so, the doctor would have had his pharmacy, his scales for weighing the powders and whatnot and measuring out everything into the way he would have needed it. this also would have become the dentist office as well. dental outside of surgery is one

of the scariest things people would have had to have done during this time period. we have our dental chair and dental drill. our dental drill is what's referred to as a treadle drill. a dreadle drill is just that. runs off a treadle like a treadle sewing machines. if would have had a series of belts on it. you would use foot power to get the belts turning. you can hear it's nice and squeaky, so you can imagine that dental drill sound. and it would have that. that would go up. of course, that would be what would cause the drill bit to turn and the dentist would use that to drill your teeth. our dental chair is a true dental chair. and medical chair that would have been used. this one was used in the circa around 1856 by a local doctor. dr. g.a. fryson, south of town. true blue dental and medicine

chair. we know by its design and function. we know if you foot pedal here, the chair can lean back. you can get a lot of angle to the patient laying in the chair. but the big thing is, is the absence of any arms built in this chair because in order for the doctor to be able to pull a tooth, he had to keep you as immobile as he could, so the patient would sit in the chair, back against the back, of course, and the doctor himself would actually just step over the patient and pin him to the chair so he could work on the patient's mouth and keep his body from moving around so much. pulling of teeth, just like today but not the novocaine or anything that they would give you. pliers were used to remove an impacted tooth. one of my favorite was a tool called a tooth key.

it consists of a handle, a shaft and a hook. it's a hinged hook. we'll pretend my fingertip is a tooth. you hang that at the base of the gum, on the edge of the tooth, rotate it around and using man power and leverage, you would rotate the tooth out of the gum line. we've all -- always hear about george washington having wooden teeth. they weren't always wooden. as the years would go by, eventually they would start making dentures and false teeth. if we look, we have ivory teeth that would be used, or porcelain. porcelain was used a lot, too. the unique thing about these dentures are that they are toxic. the base they made and used, they used lead to hold these teeth in place. so, you pop these in your mouth and your gums are fairly absorbent and pulling toxins out

left and right. so, you wear them for a few weeks. all of a sudden you start feeling sickly. doctors didn't know about lead poisoning at the time. so he tells you, well, stay off your feet for a few days. hopefully you get to feeling better. so you're not going to wear your dentures while you're in bed. you get to feeling better, back on your feet. so, you put your teeth back in. and then you get sick again. you could get lead poisoning just from wearing your dentures at the time. we talked about the doctors themselves. regionally when you look at this time period, 1830s to 1930s, if we go 1849, the records show there were only 87 doctors in the western half of louisiana. i mean, that's pretty scarious when you talk about a whole state. the doctors moved around. these doctors were much needed but, you know, always tell the kids on our tours when we do our

tours, the next time you go to your doctor, be sure to hug his or her neck or shake his or her hand thank you because of the amount of time they issued into their schooling and everything th they've done to bring us into this modern world. snooul. all weekend long american history tv is showing slooefr poer shreveport, louisiana. you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. throughout the weekend here on american history tv on c-span 3, watch personal interviews about historic events on oral histories. our history bookshelf features some of the best known history writers. revisit key figures, battles and events during the 150th

anniversary of the civil war. visit college classrooms across the country during lectures in history. go behind the scenes at museums and history sites on american artifacts and the presidency looks at the policies and legacies of past american presidents. view our complete schedule at cspan.org/history and have it e-mailed to you by pressing the c-span alert button. hi, i head up c-span's lcv project, local vehicle con tend. we have three of them. the purpose for the vehicles is to collect information from outside washington, d.c. how do we do did? we staff each one with one person with a small video camera and a laptop editor to roll, produce and edit from the road. that's what we're doing with the lcvs. why i wanted to do this is get out of washington, d.c.

we're doing an cities tour. we'll descend on each city, one will do history program, historic sites, the other will do book tv programming at bookstores, catching up with authors and the third does community relations events. they are important to us because we work with our cable partners in each city. the last thing that's important to know is all this not only goes on the air but gets archived on our website, c-span video library and the -- what we're also doing is extensive social media. you'll see us on facebook, cable partners on facebook, foursquare which is location based and tell people where we're going, on twitter. it's a chance to get out our message, not only on air but also online and through social media as well. so, that's why it's important to get outside of washington, d.c., get into place we don't normal do programming and make a commitment to get outside the beltway and do programming for all the c-span networks.

>> this crazy world of ours we have atom bombs. question isn't how to use them. question is, how do you restrain yourself from using them. that's when your commander in chief, any fool can get this country into trouble. it takes a wise man to get it out. >> as candidates campaign for president this year, we look back at 14 men who ran for the office and lost. go to our website, cspan.org/contenders. >> shouldn't your president have the highest moral and ethical standards and be an example to our children and young people in this country? ask yourself that question, please. shouldn't his life make him a role model for your future children? shouldn't anyone you elect to this office always keep his promises. >> c-span.org/thecontenders.

>> in a city dominated by statesmen, this bronze statue of albert einstein stands out. perhaps because there's little about this washington monument. even if it stands 12 feet tall and weigh approximately four tons. here robert burks, whose distinctive style had some call him the bubble gum sculpture, gives us a playful einstein. across north carolina granite, the scientist holds in his left hand a document listing some of his most significant theories. the same bench contains quotes testify fiing to einstein's unwavering tolerance, equality of law and duty of any truth-seeker to find his findings, no matter where they lead. the circular floor of the memorial features an astronomical ma