once again, mr. krick, thanks for taking phone calls from viewers. >> yes, sir. >> just a couple of minutes, the program will resume with a different perspective. david blight who is from yale university from their center for the study of slavery, resistance and abolition. we'll hear his nomination. we'll be back with phone calls in about 45 or 50 minutes or so. but you can continue the conversation online as well if you can go to twitter.com/c-span, our handle is c-span history. and also use the hash tag poty 1862. person of the year, 1862. we'll try to take a look at some of those tweets after the next historian speaks. also at facebook.com/c-span, the question is posted there. we'll read some of those throughout the day, as well. watching live coverage. you're watching live coverage from the university of -- from the library of virginia in richmond. it is an event co-hosted by the library and also by the museum of the confederacy. once again, robert krick the first of five historians who will speak toda

mr. krick mentioned jackson's interest in phrenology. whoa, douglass got very interested in the racial sciences because there was such a terrible scientific cloud hanging over his people and he went and read everything that he could find in the field that was then called ethnology and he wrote a brilliant actually lecture that he gave at a college in 1856 essentially taking to pieces the arguments, the biological argument of the racial sciences, that is that the races were born with different capacities, different shapes and sizes of heads, different abilities in this field or that field, some born to labor, some not, et cetera, et cetera, but he spent his life at times i think disgusted with even bored with the constant reference to race. as you may know, when his wife anna died, i said -- i didn't have time. i said so little of her. he met anna, a free black woman in baltimore when he's there as a teenager. turns out they had grown up three miles from each other on the eastern shore. they knew common families together. they probably pl