by communications@oberlinheritage.org | Dec 28, 2013 | Abolition
by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent It was May 27, 1857, four years before the start of the American Civil War. On this day an armed confrontation over the issue of states’ rights would occur between forces of the United States federal...
by communications@oberlinheritage.org | Dec 19, 2013 | Abolition
by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent The movie 12 Years a Slave, now showing in northeast Ohio, graphically depicts several deplorable aspects of American slavery, including the fact that freeborn African Americans could be kidnapped and carried...
by communications@oberlinheritage.org | Sep 21, 2013 | Abolition, Reconstruction Era, Women's Rights
by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent The winter of 1856 was a particularly harsh one – harsh enough that the Ohio River froze solid in January, something that only happened every few years. When it did happen, enslaved Americans on the...
by communications@oberlinheritage.org | Sep 5, 2013 | Abolition
by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent Seven years before the celebrated abolitionist Frederick Douglass first stood before a sympathetic audience of white abolitionists and “trembling in every limb” told them the story of his life as a...
by communications@oberlinheritage.org | Aug 12, 2013 | Abolition
by Ron Gorman, Oberlin Heritage Center volunteer docent I’ve decided for my next two blog entries to tell the stories of two Southern rebels who had a tremendous impact on pre-Civil War Oberlin. But these weren’t Confederate rebels, they were Southern...