Learn about one woman who stood up for what she believed in and paved the way for women voters.

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In the summer of 1863, in the simmering cauldron of New York City, tensions over the new Union draft law boiled over into a vicious, bloody, racially-motivated riot, the second-largest civil insurrection in American history after the Civil War itself. Experts examine the causes of the conflict, its sickening violence and the enduring legacy it left on New York.

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In this powerful program, two experts reflect on the successes and setbacks in the struggle for civil rights and the changing ways in which the story of the Civil Rights Movement is told, from early writers and activists like W.E.B. DuBois, to the turbulent years of the 1950s and ’60s, to the present. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Freedom Now: Photographs by Platon.

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The late 18th and early 19th centuries were a time of upheaval and revolution. In conjunction with the new exhibition, Revolution!, historians examine the tumultuous 30-year period which saw the American and Haitian Revolutions and the end of the transatlantic slave trade to the U.S. and the British colonies. How were these events related and what forces combined to effect so much social change in such a short span?

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Dorothy Thompson was the first female head of a European news bureau, and a columnist and commentator whom Time magazine once ranked alongside Eleanor Roosevelt as the most influential woman in America. Rebecca West blazed a trail for herself as a journalist, literary critic, novelist and historian.

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This program transports us to the 1963 centennial celebration of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to explore how Americans made sense of the suffering, loss and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. David W. Blight and Drew Gilpin Faust discuss how four of America’s most incisive writers—including Robert Penn Warren, a white southerner who recanted his support for segregation, and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—explored the gulf between remembrance and reality.

In commemoration of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War, the Bryant Park Reading Room presents a lecture series by eminent scholars discussing their most recent works on the Civil War. In this program, author Randall Fuller will discuss From Battlefields Rising, his new book examining the profound impact of the war on 19th-century writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Douglass, among others. This series is produced in partnership with the Bryant Park Reading Room and Oxford University Press.

In commemoration of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Civil War, the Bryant Park Reading Room presents a lecture series by eminent scholars discussing their most recent works on the Civil War. In this program, Jane E. Schultz, a leading expert on Civil War nursing, will discuss her book This Birth Place of Souls and examine one woman’s critical role on the battlefields of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. This series is produced in partnership with the Bryant Park Reading Room and Oxford University Press.