This week on the Lectures and History podcast, Stetson University Professor David Morton

teaches a class on the 1876 Great Sioux War in the South Dakota Black Hills. The conflict

included the Battle of Little Bighorn, often called Custer's Last Stand, which was fought June 25th through 26th,

1876, near the Little Bighorn River, in what is now southeastern Montana.

It remains one of the most famous battles between the U.S. Army and Native American tribes

during the era of westward expansion.

More after this. All right, well, hello and welcome. So glad to

have you guys here for today's talk. We are in the endgame of our first section in this course.

And, of course, one of the big things I've been attempting to emphasize in section one is

the post-Civil War period not just being

a moment of political transformation through the political revolution of the reconstruction

period, but also beyond that too, how the United States, in a geographic sense, ends up fulfilling its so-called manifest destiny.

In our last lecture, we briefly looked at some clips

from the man who shot Liberty Valance

and how John Ford interrogated this idea

about this underlying tension that we see in American history.

And we saw it very clearly in our Reconstruction section,

this idea about truth, liberty, and democracy

being this underlying value that guided,

especially Abraham Lincoln's leadership

during the American Civil War,

and later Republican politicians

...