meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The Light Watkins Show

141: Frederick Douglass: The Unlikely Journey of the Most Photographed Man in the World with Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author and Historian, David Blight (Replay)

The Light Watkins Show

Light Watkins

Self-improvement, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.9960 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2023

⏱️ 116 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, we have an experimental episode in store. Having had some amazing guests on the show who have told us their backstories and shared with us their inspirations, why limit them to those that still walk the earth today?One of the historical figures that are very intriguing is Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist that was born a slave, and eventually became one of the most prominent abolitionists of his time, even heralded as the most famous Black man in the world, and the most photographed ...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

So he mastered these many different forms of writing, which not everybody can do, even if they're

0:09.9

an accomplished writer.

0:11.8

And he did some of that greatest writing in crisis moments of his life.

0:17.0

I mean really difficult personal times in his life, which is not uncommon for a lot of great artists,

0:25.0

but it's certainly true here,

0:27.0

like the early 1850s.

0:28.0

His whole life is coming apart in the 1850s.

0:31.0

He can't even feed his family.

0:33.0

His newspaper almost dies every week or every month.

0:36.0

He goes through this terrible public breakup with Garrison,

0:40.0

this personal scandal, but he produces his greatest speech as one novella and his

0:45.4

greatest long-form masterpiece in bondage and freedom and some of the best

0:49.8

editorials ever written in the history of abolitionism all in a three or four year

0:54.0

period. While he was having, I'm convinced, a kind of nervous breakdown.

1:01.5

Hello friends and welcome back to the Light Watkins show. Today I am re-erring an

1:06.8

episode from the early days of this podcast which is something that we do from

1:10.6

time to time but this wasn't just any old episode. This was an incredible

1:16.0

experiment that I honestly don't feel like I've repeated as much as I wanted to or intended

1:21.1

to when I first came up with the idea.

1:24.0

So long story short, back in 2020, in the first year of this podcast,

1:28.0

I decided to interview not just current living guests,

1:32.0

but also historical figures.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Light Watkins, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Light Watkins and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.