History Events in Washington

Time and again, we've struggled to agree upon slavery's place in Washington's legacy. For nearly the entirety of our history, Americans have been arguing about George Washington and slavery. Drawing on research from his latest book, historian John Garrison Marks will explore how generations of Americans have remembered, forgotten, manipulated and wielded Washington's entanglements with slavery over the past 250 years. As both a prolific enslaver for his entire life, as well as, the emancipator of more than 120 of the people he enslaved, George Washington's complex relationship with slavery has vexed Americans for centuries. Time and again, we've struggled to agree upon slavery's place in Washington's legacy. In this lecture, Marks will explore how abolitionists, politicians, educators, museum professionals, descendants of slavery at Mount Vernon and countless others have all fought to shape our collective memory of George Washington and slavery over the last two centuries—and what those fights reveal about our ongoing struggle to reckon with the past.

See King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) with a special new live orchestral score, composed and conducted by Andrew Earle Simpson.