,may 24, 1861. frank townsend, james baker, and shepherd mallory get a boat under the cover of darkness and row into fortis monroe where the union just arrived. there are confederates all around. these gentlemen had been building confederate fortifications for their master. they knew they were about to go down to north carolina to build fortifications for the confederacy and david b leaving their families and they decided to chance it. they came into union lines. the next morning a confederate soldier comes under flag of truce and says, please return the slaves. they came to you last night. they hesitated. were rebels really entitled to benefits of the fugitive slave law?

weren't they foreign country? that is what he said. you say you are a foreign country. i guess u.s. laws don't apply to you. so he said, i'm confiscating these three men as contraband property of war. they were used in service of the confederacy. now they are union property. he even gave the confederate soldier a receipt. so what is contraband? this spreads incredibly quickly. through newspapers rub the north. all of a sudden you see minstrel shows of the contraband. it becomes a now, part of common parlance. is something of a legal trick. is in in between status. matter slave nor free. you are a ward of the government.

you are a piece of property like smuggled goods but you are a person. your labor is useful. but whatever the ambiguities of contraband, it definitely is a link to emancipation. we can save fort monroe is the birthplace of the emancipation because this contraband decision does one of two things. it makes congress recognize they first, have to do something. congress sanctions this decision. and then slaves themselves hear of it. the grapevine network works. they hear come to fort monroe. maless not just individual aml s who are coming. it's a fitting place for this to happen because it was in 1619

that a dutch trading ship right dropped 20 africans in a sale to the english colony. the first africans we know of touching american soil. -- the first africans we know touching american soil touches year the exact place that the contraband decision is enacted. that emancipation sees its first root. now that is the first story. the second story am pretty sure you don't know. this actually is a very popular harpers image that gets repeated again and again.

the three gentlemen appealing the butler. now this is mary armstrong. this is mary in 1937. she was 91 years old. i want you to go back with me to 1863 when she is 17-years-old. has mary tells it, it was 1863 when mr. wills set us free. i'm going to find my mama. she get her free papers and gets a pack of food, a pack of clothes and a little money energy is a ticket to texas. on this map, 1863, these stars are battles. mary was a 17-year-old lack girl with free papers hidden in her bosom and was traveling through a war zone.

mary takes the riverboat to new -- from st. louis down to new orleans and gets on another boat to galveston, texas. she gets another boat of buffalo bayou to houston. and she gets a rickety stagecoach to austin. now in austin is when a man stops her. she says austin, we have trouble shores. where you going? the man asked her. he puts down an auction block. she gets sold. now when the highest bidder comes to claim his prize, right in front of everyone she pulls out her free papers. he holds them up high. so high he can't see them.

let me see them. mary says you just look up here. then he squints up. this gal is free and she's got papers. a legislature man taken with him for a while. slaves andeets other she learns there is a refugee camp in wharton, texas. mary tells the interviewer in 1937 i go, i find my mama. county near where wharton is. lord me, talk about crying and singing and crying some more. we sure done it. mary armstrong was not pushing

lincoln's arm to the emancipation proclamation. texas is by no place the birthplace of freedom. the emancipation proclamation didn't even apply to texas. there was active slave trade going on. that is what made her move such a risk. they crystallizes what is important to her. how she thinks of what is she going to do with her freedom. mary armstrong spreads the power of the emancipation proclamation into texas. she took her free self into the war over slavery. the camp she came to inhabit was not like other refugee camps. it was a gathering place, a place of exchanging information. it was a place of making and building. a place for people found their families. puts wharton,ong texas on the map. this is a map of the refugee camp's of the american civil

war. this is something that created with a database, geocoding and and gis software. maps of 244 camps. if you included the plantation, it would be about 562. your looking somewhere between 800,000 to one million slaves on the move. some of these camps are union run. some freed slaves. so let's look. let's see if i can get this to work. there we go. we have camps all down the eastern seaboard, a cluster of

area, in the. chesapeake bay area. the south carolina and georgia sea islands. a few places in florida and key west. and then you have another , a high concentration along the mississippi river. new orleans, of course. union occupied by 1862. you have contraband colonies there. you have the census of 1850 with 770,000 slaves a long here. in the that represented camps. they are very crowded. its were chaplin john eaton took meticulous records. this is just an incredibly rich

source of material. what you have here in the southern louisiana is you have plantations and planters that often comply with the union and keep their slaves at a wage labor agreement. but you still see a lot of migrating and movement between camps. it's a new era of information dissemination between refugees and these camps. is not just individual man who came. let's look at the coming into the camp because this is a different kind of coming. after enlistment it will be majority female, majority child.

and the infirm in these caps. -- camps. there's a lot of building going on nevertheless. they came as families. there was no precedent for this kind of exodus of enslaved people. before the work you have the typical runaway as an individual male. now they pack wagons with babies and property. they packed up blind octogenarians. people who would been on the plantation all their lives. they packed up all these things. they didn't just look like fugitives. often they look like pioneers. they would like homesteaders. that is what they were thinking. one chaplin said the are coming by the oncoming of cities. cloud, a like a black virginia observer said. we just witnessed a dragon train

-- wagon train were all the women were breast-feeding and a whole caravan of walkers behind them. by entering the union in this way refugees were imagining something different. interested in blackmail labor -- black male labor. at fort monroe, the 3 original fidget is had employed building confederate fortifications. their confiscation was a clear boon. but what to do with all these families? northern businessman lauded the contraband decision. it was highly profitable. it was a good move militarily. but they advised only males be accepted. send the women and children back to the confederacy to be their burden. that was the military policy

they were advising. the refugees don't let this happen. but by coming as families, they were imagining permanent freedoms that can only be possible if they came as families. even individuals came of families in mind. there were learning how to read and write. they could write information wanted ads, letters to some of you might know whether kinfolk might be. they sought to create havens. havens were they can reconstitute families that slavery had read asunder. let's look at what happens inside the camps on the get there. there are familiar scenes. there is the labor. island.

they are fording the rappahannock river finales possessions in so. the government or the seven claims commission reimburses them for objects the union confiscated. at the time all the things they breed in that spring in going for general contraband fund. a look at the south carolina sea islands. you see lots of free lever -- labor movements happening. how fast can we grow cotton? how profitable can we be with wage labor? there is lots of wrangling over who does what, over whether the women will work over if you will work in families are in gangs. slaves prefer to work with their families.

they preferred to work in a task system. especially in rice culture. you have a lot of dissension even between missionaries and the contraband camp superintendents. refugees also want to plant food and gardens, something that will sustain. union agents want cotton. they want profit, commercial stable crops. there are also labor shortages. there are private companies paying $25 a month sometimes. and this is where men often want to be laborers in their families. enlistment becomes something of an ambivalent enterprise. the military contract will take them elsewhere, usually off to

texas or downriver far away from where their families are. picture of unloading on the docks. a lot are hack drivers, like a taxi driver, or teamsters. 19th century ups. you also have this question about women's labor. they do make four dollars a month as cooks for the army. a lot of them are in school. a lot of them are learning how bagsad as they also sew for the army. we can see a town built on the ashes of hampton. right near fortress monroe. a lot of women are doing this work. they are chopping the wood. they are taking on a sort of

household headship. they become the backbone of the agricultural labor force. they are interested in growing things for themselves. so with this we can see how they are imagining land. how they are imagining and deciding amongst them selves who lives where, where are the property lines. you get a one acre plot, you get an eight-acre plot. the army is not mediating this. the redistribution of land would become very contentious. sherman;s order number 15 ropes off charleston to the st. johns river in florida for redistribution among free people. it's one of the most heartbreaking turns of reconstruction that this landed pulled out from under them and give back to their former masters.

nevertheless they still make a way for themselves. in fact, a man in the 1970's said he could actually just barter in the south carolina sea islands for a long time until air-conditioning came along. then hilton head and all the resort is -- resorters. you have many free people making community that last. let's look at another example of land, one you may or may not know about what arlington cemetery used to be. lee's estate becomes one of the most successful refugee camps of the civil war. while robert e lee and jefferson davis are out trying to win a war there are free people on their plantation. they are giving it up and making communities there.

the friedman -- freedman's village becomes a model community. it's a blueprint of how it's going to look. it is made by a black doctor. the friedman's hospital in washington dc. there was an industrial school, a church. it become successful but the government when it wants to expand the cemetery can't get anyone to leave and they have to buy them out. the u.s. government agrees to pay $7,000 to buy up the families that lived there. each family gets approximately $350, it would be about $9,000 in today's money. but local farmers took all these residents in, and today those sites are followed hilton washington, d.c.

we also have the familiar churches and schools, the philanthropic societies that go into these camps, that are interested in creating a public education system. you even have integrated schools were local whites go along with the local freedmen. black preachers of southern heritage, like methodist preacher henry mcneal turner, garland white, a baptist. the union subsidizes their trips or the south. they are coming to these camps. they are bolstering black religious networks. these are the scenes and want to -- that are not as familiar and these the ones i want to explore. i want to push past opc as a familiar sight of self emancipation. midwiferysee the

happening in the camps. is not as families coming in but pregnant women. lineey make it across the the line so they are giving birth in slavery and not in freedom, their child will also be free. it's the maternal law of consent. the bedrock, the cornerstone cornerstone of this slave system is at this late status will pass through the mother. an expectant mother makes the journey, even if it's arduous entities can't so she can get -- camps so she can give birth out of slavery. we know that midwives come with them. because a doctor makes a report. their own grannies --

this is the term used. their own grannies who were generally youngish or middle-aged a lot of women are well skilled in the scientific medical agents of our art. these are found among the contraband not infrequently. i would suggest the government secure their services. these camps and these different chaotic congested places become , incubators for disease. but it is using these spaces ec healers using see herbs and using their knowledge. cucumber reince for skin irritation. watermelon seeds for constipation. i have learned a lot reading these records.

what you also see with watermelon, what -- water is a constant source of plantation. if you have watermelons, you have the ability to hydrate. young children are the majority demographic in many of these camps. is really striking. in one sense from june 1864 in the mississippi valley, 390 men, 2138 women, 3372 children. that's 57% children. unlike most wars in this case, refugees were running towards the lines. they were giving birth out of slavery because it was meaningful, even though it was even birth in a war zone.

it was often ugly, against fence posts, women finding whatever they could to cut umbilical cords. they stick to their customs. they need to bury the placenta, so they looking for places to do that and they are determined to do that even if they are in a place of deprivation. this is a reconstruction from the point of view of midwives of invention. this was ingenuity in the face of great crisis. and actually this photograph here is in midwifery school at penn school at saint helena island, where a successful refugee camp is. here is a picture of refugees in the rain.

water, water, water. shoes and water. these are not familiar scenes in the same way we see the degueratype. but shoes and water are all over the record. you can't get through a page without seeing another plea, another action motivated by need for shoes and water. andy ingenuity that comes with -- and the ingenuity that comes with finding these are making these -- shoes are desirable for passage over the rocky terrain to make the migration into the camp. of course in urban areas, shoes give you status. it means you may not be owned, you can walk more freely without suspicion. with shoes, you can pass through seeming like you are on a rent. -- an errand.

children went barefoot all the time, some woman said. small shoes were especially hard to come by. the aid workers are in earnest. just send shoes, they write to all the bostonians and new yorkers and pennsylvanians who are sending goods their way. we know shoes are especially important because slave masters during this time locked them up at night. the clothing, boots and shoes of negroes are locked up in many cases to prevent them from going off. masters blame their slaves departures on their ability to procure shoes. the two negroes begged of him i got five dollars to buy shoes just to run away in. but this was not just mobility, it was mobility they could control. refugee emma binum once she got

, her shoes, she left the camp and she went to d.c. to search for her daughter. the black soldiers said he enlisted so he could send his enlistment bounty to the woman i call my lady so she could get some shoes. that's what he spent all his money on. water was of paramount importance. because a downpour like this meant you got a shower. one refugee said his spit was cotton until his group found some of those mud holes. they would be plum bloody, but we would drink that water as if it was the best in the world. rain could mean floods and it could compromise shelters, but it was hygiene too. waterways are passages, and this is easy transportation if you had something that could keep

you afloat. and confederates were notorious for destroying anything they could be a flotation device. but slaves were incredibly ingenious, striving together different wheatgrass. using wheelbarrows. access to fresh, drinkable water was important, and this is why the south carolina sea island access to fresh, drinkable water was important, and this is why the south carolina sea island refugees do so well and why they stayed and built. there's not just saltwater, there's potable water. some mississippi river islands, they would become strategic readouts. presidents island, johnson's island, island number 10. these are the locations of contraband camps, places of protection, and they become places unto themselves, places of an experiment.

most of these islands are all women and children and they learn how to do for themselves. they built lasting connections, even if the island communities themselves don't last. there is even a story of all slaves gravitate to rivers during this period and make their way through them. during this time as there is great migrations of free slaves, you see mexicans setting up great platforms right in the middle of the rio grande. if you can swim that platform without drowning, you can get your freedom in mexico. you are not just going north, you are going south too. the other scene i wanted to bring to your attention was revival.

i argue that emancipation is a religious event. emancipation gets marked religiously by freed people in these caps. you will see it again and again, and it's not about a particular nomination trying to bring people into the fold. there is conversions, but it's ot the same as jesus christ as your lord and savior. it's much more oriented towards bringing about the result of emancipation, being in direct conversation with god. here you see in this slide -- this is on december 31, 862. to make emancipation on january 1 as promised,. meetings last all through the night.

a lot of them are female lead. emancipation was an awakening. a new england minister captures his feelings. this is outside new orleans. he writes of the experience he had observing one of these watch night meetings. for a few moments, perfect silence prevailed. then a single voice coming from a dark corner of the room began a low, mournful chants in which the whole assemblage joined by degrees. an old man knelt down to pray. his voice when it first flow, then gained impulse. as he went on, he burst out with a good dear lord, we pray for the colored people. thou knowest not what we have been through.

o us free. the audience swayed back and forth in their seats. and then one or two began a wild, mournful chorus. in an instant, all joined in and the sound swelled upwards and downwards like the waves of the sea. the ritual he described as weird and overwhelming, he half laughed and then felt deep sadness. it was improvised and yet ordinate it. this is how strangers met and forged a language, a common way of knowing. this is just outside new orleans, a month after the emancipation proclamation. these few hundred blacks had come from a radius of 40 miles

to meet in a rude church and voice their chat for permanent freedom. funerals become the bane of the existence of many an army commander because there is a lot of death in these camps. they insist on having an all-night funeral for every fallen person. it starts at midnight for the torch procession. the coffin is very important. free people fight hard for coffins. there are so many protests over burying too many people in a whole. the refugee funerals lasted all night, sometimes into the morning. in fact, congress even passes a law.

they want chaplains to give a monthly report saying how these funerals are going on, what's going on with the funerals. they show us that refugee camp's were simultaneously faces of death and possibility. slave religions reduced a technology for communing around. buffering is destructive, but under a system in which suffering had been so much a part of everyday life, for slaves could also be redemptive. the commander of the first african-american regiment of volunteers -- i learned to think that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes but overrated demoralization, or rather we did not know how the religious

temperament of the negroes had checked demoralization. they shared loss, and loss became one strategy for meaning making and kinship forming. suffering could be redemptive great the purpose of many of these meetings was directly positioned to bring about permanent emancipation. that is what is different. it's a little passive aggressive, when he gave him an receipt, but he's also saying you can come back for your slaves as soon as you pledge loyalty, things will go back. what free people were pushing for was a permanent freedom great if they did not find their family, they made their amily.

this was a climax of a folk religion speaking of freedom, and strivings for lost family erupted, and in the void because there often weren't reunions, came religious means of conceiving new can. et's look at how the camps change the landscape. they get shut down on paper, but the people go someplace. fort monro was a case in point. we have fort monro as a mecca, rendezvous point. you can see it in the wta interviews that fdr, the new deal conducts in the 1930's. they systematically interview former slaves. they were talking about fort monro even then. here are the numbers of the

people who come into fort monroe. the three on may 23, 1861. 67 in the next week. by summer there is 800, 500 of which are women and children. by early 1862, 1500. june, 5,000. by 1864, four monro and the satellite camps around it. the islands are more of a peninsula with a little strip they had to find these other camps and open them. it becomes home to 39,110 free people. this is where we can see, if you look at census maps, that is the increase in norfolk county. that's the legacy of the contraband camp in fort

monro. you also have the grand contraband cap, built on the ashes of the confederate coming n and guerrilla warfare. they build it again, and it becomes a place where hampton institute, historically black university, becomes the linchpin for the black middle class. alexandria, washington, d.c.. we look at that as a case in point. multiple contraband caps on would forever change the character of the nation's capital. the black population of alexandria increases from 2802 7300. april 16, 1862.

d.c. declares immediate emancipation. everyone from maryland and virginia coming into their borders. in 1863, the black population of d.c. was just over 14,000. by 1870 it was 43,000. memphis, tennessee is called new africa. there are six refugee caps there. they actually outnumber the white population in memphis. he population quadruples between 1860 and 1870. let's turn back to marry and her migration in 1863. what was the side of the refugees driven further south by their masters? here was a meeting ground and

he site of reunion realized. this crystallizes something so important to me. she got her free papers in 1863. you often think of urban spaces as the place of freedom greatness was under union control. she could enjoy her freedom, earn wages. instead she went to texas, where the slave trade was active, hunting for her mother. more than the security of a wage, making assertions of equality, living actual legal freedom, mary went to texas because freedom's function was claim to her kin. it was being together. freedom did not mean anything if she wasn't with her mom. she wanted to know she existed,

new her location. even when free people find out their next of kin is dead, they want the body sent act. and the union often obliges. it is the force and forcefulness of these families to be together that made freedom meaningful. a place of possibility opened up for reunion in this world instead of the next, which had been the core of like religion for all of slavery times. it was a possibility to remedy that prayer that was so often cited. it had been just white noise coming in the background. i will meet you on the other side. i will meet you in heaven. now maybe it could be i will meet you at fort monroe. here it was in these caps that slaves innovated new families of adoption, a woman with eight children finds another lost in a cornfield on the way and

adopts her. the coming together of the cap played out the choreography of reunion. it was in these cramped communal spaces of mass existence that they turned strangers into kin, with song, late-night meeting, all-night funeral. in this way, refugee camps set up the blueprint for community reconstruction. thank you so much. anybody want to ask a uestion?

inaudible] >> about mary's trip to mississippi in 1863, there was not much real regular passenger service. how did that work? how did she get down to new orleans? do you know? >> the way she tells it -- this is mary's own words. i will give it to you from the way she describes what the boat was. it was a scary experience for her, she had been in st. louis all her life. she said she got on a boat with

a big wheel on it in the back. and she had to stay crouched down near the wheel. don't make any fuss -- it wasn't about hiding, she could be there. she had a ticket. her master who freed her help her get a ticket. it was possible there was a cargo piece of this. stay near the big wheel and don't show your papers, don't ook at anybody in the eye. but she was the only can she knew. she did get married to george armstrong shortly after the war, 1866. they settled in houston. she lived, her mother and

eorge armstrong, and she sure. i'm going to repeat the question. he asked did mary find her family and then what happened next? where did she go afterwards? yes. what happened is she -- she finds her mothor and she is the ornl mother -- her mother was sold away when she was about four years old and her master actually legally sold her mother her mods moer was actually on loan. and he sort of got extra pocket money by taking her down to louisiana. so she was determined to find her but she was the only kin that she knew. she did get married to george armstrong shortly after the war 1866 and they moved settled in houston. she lived -- her mother and

george armstrong. and she actually becomes a nurse and is very active and award for special elping with the yellow fever epidemic later in the century. you can see her posing here. she is very much -- you can see that she is proud of her story and proud of her experience. thank you. >> my question is about a more sensitive topic. freed african-american women being frequent targets of sexual assault and frequent victims, particularly at the hands of white soldiers, i was wondering if you had any information about this occurring in these refugee camps and what, if any, the

response was from the community. prof. cooper: as you can imagine, a core piece of reconstruction is about women's sexuality and the fears of what has been inherited from slavery. what's interesting is both subjection and liberation, you actually have women bringing charges of rape. what is harrowing about it is you get to hear the details of the experiences of rape. but it's also the first time this is able to be named as rape. it's never been legally construed as such. a union soldier gets 5 years for rape in the norfolk rea.

you do have missionaries who re especially aware of it. this is where camps become laces of survival. the survival is at first exciting for missionaries. . then they become alarmed. they are led by women. women are trying to find how to have their own dual dentities. later it's claimed people make arguments defending white women have to do with contact,

children need good mothers despite whatever kind of different stereo types are rend dangered against them. thank you. >> thank you. >> at the same time that all these african-american refugees are fleeing to union lines, there's also southern white unionists that are also going to union lines to escape conscription. can you talk about the relationship between these black refugee caps and white refugees who are showing up at the same time, how they relate to each other, how the overnment relates to them? >> absolutely. there are white -- in fact refugees -- it's interesting because in the records, in the bureau, [inaudible] so there's leads. there's not necessarily -- i

used it. it's not necessarily. it does get -- refugee schools. but you see whilet refugees in that language. in - different places different context laces like north carolina totally segregated. and the white unionists are locals and they feel kind of entitlement. they get 16 times the rations mostly because north in other are places. it's sort of tennessee plus jane austin. ut this novel about this white refugee unionist lost her children. she had five children.

she loses one and she's so depressed. and a black refugee said you've got to get it together. ou have four other children. you've got to keep going. it becomes a bit of a religious text. thank you for your uestion. >> i'm thinking about the black people in the north and recently freed people in the south at the extent to which the people in the north could reach out and do something. they did send a lot of soldiers down there. could you speak to that a little bit? prof. cooper: free black communities and the north, how are they interacting. you have soldiers. you have transplants who are southern born and now living in

the north. black teachers -- charlotte is in the south carolina sea sland. you have mary todd, lady in waiting. hatever the term is. t you see them mobilizing so that youhave mutual aid societies, getting funds from black communities in the north. methodist, episcopal and episcopal zion churches are active in the effort. you do see a little bit of compension.

a lot of free people are nterested in homesteading. one man says, i will wait on he union sons. give me another year before i will sign up for your three-year tour. they are a little wary of wage labor sometimes, and interested in worshiping in a circle. it's actually a really interesting moment. thank you. >> hello. i'm from los angeles,

california. how did one go about establishing a refugee camp? was there land set aside by the government? >> they are so diverse. it's actually a work in progress, that i have a website. it is so different for each one. i'll give you an overview. inaudible] what you see are sometimes they are self-made, sometimes they re union made.

ften what is interesting about the union made camps is there is a certain level of neglect. within neglect, there are places for autonomy. the flip side of that is you have deaths, health crises. sometimes it takes a few allies. there is a union town. what happens is they basically get an ally to get them 20 pegs of nails and boards and they build a community that is so successful that they start making profit off turpentine and the union tries to kick hem out. you find all kinds of gypsy communities moving around. more people come around.

all of a sudden you have a town on the census in 1860. all of a sudden you will find hese places completely created by people on the move. the mississippi valley camps have the best record. john eden is a very abolitionist chaplain. these are regulated by the government, but meant to have free people call the shots as uch as possible. [inaudible] this is where -- the birth of different yurok receipts. it's good for historians to get a read on their notes. the superintendent of contraband is not a military role, but they often give this role to chaplains.

they become assistant, then superintendent -- assistant superintendent. they choose different people who are good at reading just a little bit, and in they become teachers. this is how you have the first teachers. this is how you have so many women. even though you read the memoirs of like politicians, their wives are helping them read the paper because they got education in these camps. this is where you start hearing of the improvised leadership culture, especially among female missionaries and the superintendence. >> david rosen from alexandria, virginia. i was struck by your comment about the pensions of refugees to have their own land at homestead. is there anything to be said about what happened subsequently between the former refugees and the possibility of

homesteading? prof. cooper: thank you for that question. kansas actually has the best outcome. there is a movement in 1879 where african-americans in the outh who have been harrassed o to kansas. you have astounding land in leavenworth, kansas. this is people -- the big devastation is on the south carolina sea islands. they are building with the intention of having these lands for themselves. if they think they are going to get it, a few get in an time to keep their land. the court has already ruled.

what happens with andrew johnson, basically sherman's order goes forward in january 1865. then johnson revokes it that summer, and so howard, the head of the freeman's, has to break he bad news. there are possibilities. you even have people going west. you have people going up. illinois is the free state southernmost on the mississippi. you see people taking that passage and finding land, even going to nebraska, michigan, wisconsin. thank you. that is perfect timing. much for your

participation and the conversation. [applause] >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of american programming every weekend. follow us on twitter at c-span history. up next, history professor tammy ingram discusses her book the wickedest city in america. she chronicles the crime investigation committee chaired by tennessee senator estes kefauver. national archives center for

legislative archives hosted this event. it is just under one hour. >> thank you for attending this talk. researcher talks invites scholars to tell us about their projects and have the records support them. senatehe highly visible and house investigations of the 1950's have received much research attention over the last two years, we have invited historians to speak about their work in these records. several historians of spoken to us about the senate select committee on improper activities in labor and management.