Glory

You know, that, that's a great question, and, um, I often think about the fact that a, a big reason why I am such, uh, a keen observer of history is that growing up as a, as a little boy in Augusta, Georgia, uh, my parents really instilled in me a love of history.

Uh, in particular, I can recall one moment where my father sat me down when I was five years old to watch the film Glory, uh, with him.

Um, and I think many of your listeners probably know what Glory is about, but in case they don't, uh, Glory is a film about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the first all-Black regiments to serve in the American Civil War.

Uh, it's a film starring Denzel Washington, uh, Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, a, a who's who of actors, and it's-- I think I would argue it's the greatest Civil War film ever made.

Uh, it's certainly one of the few that actually deals with the war and what it was really about.

You still have living somewhere in the recesses of your memory as like warm pockets of being when you were reading a good book, watching a good movie.

For me, it's like watching the movie Glory with my family.

Why did we connect with that movie? I could go on a whole dissertation about why we connected on that movie, but I won't do it here.

But like, you know, whether it's that, the movie Glory about the 54th Massachusetts, i.e. the first black regiment to fight in the Civil War, we bawled our eyes out.

Like we saw so much of ourselves, the Americans we believed we were, the America we believed in and believed we were a part of in that movie.

And we clearly weren't the only ones.