Well, good afternoon everyone before we begin today's event. I would like to thank the National Archives for hosting this event and those of you joining us today for this conversation. About a new biography on William still written by Andrew Deemer titled vigilance the life of William still bother the underground railroad. So, I wonder if we could start this off this conversation with Andrew with you telling us who was William still. Why you decided to write a biography on William still. And how did you go about writing this book. Thanks. So, I guess, to put it most succinctly William still is the most important figure in the most important portion of the underground railroad during the most important period of that institution's existence. So he is. He was a man who was born to two parents who had been enslaved both his parents have been enslaved in Maryland. His father was able to purchase his freedom, his mother ran away. So the two of them raised their family in rural New Jersey so William still was the youngest of 18 children so an enormous family. He was born free in the free state of New Jersey. As he as a man he moved to Philadelphia so he spent his adult life in Philadelphia, very quickly became involved in the the abolitionist movies more broadly but but more particularly the underground railroad so he became the chair of what was known as the vigilance this was a kind of institution that supported fugitive slaves protected fugitive slaves and made it more likely that they were going to succeed in running away and so he spends the 1850s really committed to this work he himself shelters hundreds of fugitive slaves. He worked involved him in all sorts of dramatic events throughout the 1850s. Eventually he would also become a wealthy man he would become a cold dealer philanthropist civil rights activists and ultimately offer he would become a storyteller of the underground railroad as well. What brought me to William still story was that I was working on an earlier book, and that earlier book was about it was a kind of more academic study about the struggle for black citizenship rights, and I kept coming on this guy William still, who I knew vaguely. I knew that he was involved in the underground railroad, but because I knew that the places he was showing up were really surprising to me in public he was making public speeches he was writing letters to the newspaper he was chairing committees in public. All of this stuff ran counter to what I thought I knew about the underground railroad which is that it had to be done in secret. The book really began with this story, or this question of, why is this, this man who's doing this illegal work the stuff that should be secret at doing so publicly. And that really was the germ of this book and as I dug into William still story, it became so compelling to me that I felt like this was a story that other people will be interested in not just was I of course I was interested in uncovering who this man was and why he was doing other things he was doing but I felt like this was something that people would be interested in. As you were writing a research in this book, did you face any challenges and researching this book about William still like where did you know where to go to learn about William stole his life and find these sources. Yeah, I would say there are a few different challenges so whenever you decide, I think, biography presents challenges and that when you're trying to tell the whole of the person's life. There are always going to be parts of that person's life that are easier to write about to research than other parts. So, for example, the 1850s, the period in which still is working on the underground railroad is a period of his life that's remarkably well documented and he himself kept these remarkable records of aiding fugitive slaves and historians know that these are some of the most important records we have of this work on the underground railroad and so his professional life in the 1850s has this remarkable documentation. But when you're writing about a person you want to, you don't just want to talk about the professional life and you don't just want to talk about this period that's well documented. You want to talk about who he was as a person, what his relationships were like, and those things were sometimes difficult to get at so we have lots of letters talking with professional associates, but very little of the kind of personal documentation that biographers need to understand, say, what is still his relationship with his wife with Titus still, who clearly was an important part of his work, but because still spent so much of his life in Philadelphia he wasn't traveling a great deal. We don't have letters between her because they were presumably having their conversations over the dinner table or wherever else husbands and wives have their conversations. And so getting at those personal relationships was challenging in certain ways. I went back to the Underground Railroad in the title of your book, you referred to the title of your book, you referred to William still as the father of the Underground Railroad. As you know in the book, the biography written, there are many individuals involved in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia and the surrounding communities. And enslaved people have been escaping bondage in Philadelphia, well before still arrived in Philadelphia in 1844. So why is still considered the father of the Underground Railroad in this portion of Pennsylvania. So, so actually, you know when I, when I came up with this title for the book. One of the first people I asked to read this for me his first response even before he read it was, you got to change the title. This exact reason I may objected to the idea that still was the father, but I'll make note of something here so I'm very careful with the article here so I don't call him the father of the Underground Railroad I simply say father of the Underground Railroad. So I think, as I, as I was thinking about this. So first off, this isn't something I made up so in various points and in particular in obituaries still was identified as the father of the Underground Railroad. And so, as I was thinking about that assertion, I got to thinking about what it means to be a father, right. And I try I talk a little bit about this in the introduction. If we think about fathers simply as creators, then there's no way that you could see still as father right that there, it predated him. There were lots of people doing this work all over the United States and in Canada. You can't call him the father of the Underground Railroad but I think fathers are more than just creators. You know so I think when I talk about William still as father or a father of the Underground Railroad I'm thinking about him as someone who nurtures and protects and supports and I think in that regard still as much as anyone I would say more than anyone deserves to be identified as father he spends, you know, this professional period of his life the late 40s into the end of the 1850s, devoting the vast majority of his waking hours to this work of aiding fugitive slaves, doing all sorts of stuff and we can talk a little bit about the, the particulars of the work that he was doing and aiding fugitive slaves in this period. But it's, you know, it's this work that ends up aiding, you know, perhaps a thousand people in their flight to freedom, and still is really instrumental in making that work. He's not the only one and he would never claim to be the only one, but he's at the center of this vast network that is being constructed prior to his arrival but I think he's doing a great deal to kind of strengthen this network and expand this network of people who are doing this work of aiding fugitive slaves. So how did it still become involved in the Underground Railroad. So, you know, as I mentioned, his parents had both been enslaved. And in fact, his mother was was a fugitive from slavery so she was, she changed her name she had to conceal her identity and, and throughout the 1850s still never let it be known that her mother was still legally a fugitive from slavery, for obvious reasons. But I think it's clear that from a very early age, not only was still being told the stories about his parents background in slavery. Still had been. There were two older brothers who Sidney later charity still had left behind in bondage because she didn't think that she could bring them with her still still grew up knowing these stories about his own family who remained in bondage. He grew up understanding that that even though he was a free person that he had a responsibility to help those who were seeking freedom themselves. And we also know that from a very early age, his family was sheltering fugitive slaves. There was a particular story when he was growing up in southern New Jersey, where he along with an older brother in law, helped a man who was fleeing from slavery find safety. So this was something that he kind of grew up with it wasn't something that he had to just decide on his own as an adult. So when he comes to Philadelphia so he leaves behind South Jersey where he his family I basically brought him into this responsibility that he had of helping fugitive slaves. When he comes to Philadelphia, he joins this really you know and there's been a ton of scholarship on the black community of Philadelphia and I build on that in this book and I draw on it. He joins this community where aiding fugitive slaves is also a community responsibility so black churches black mutual aid associations, black families are sheltering fugitive slaves and so by joining this community he's sort of re immersing himself in this work of aiding fugitive slaves. But then, you know, after a couple of years of unsuccessful or sort of sporadically finding work and of course, coming to Philadelphia the whole point was to find work to improve himself to improve his economic circumstances. He eventually found this job at the Pennsylvania anti slavery society, working as a clerk, doing all sorts of work but very quickly it became clear that the most important work that still will be doing here would be working for the vigilance committee so. This is a, this is a kind of work that had been personal this is you know familial, but by the late 1840s it's become professional as well he's being paid. He's a professional abolitionist. He is being subsidized by the Pennsylvania anti slavery society in order to do this work and so that frees him up to devote, you know all this making hours to this to where we're prior previously, maybe it was something you could do on your spare time or you had to fit it into the other things that you were doing to keep your family afloat. Now this was still work and so that I think that makes him somewhat distinctive. One thing you know so when we think about, you know, African Americans who were professional abolitionists, most of them are speakers or writers who also do some of this work, still is is the rare black abolitionist who is primarily doing this work. You know so that gives us that first off you know makes him important in a way in this work in a way that many people who are doing it sporadically or informally have less direct responsibility for this work, but I think also gives us a window into the way the underground railroad worked. Yeah, back to those earlier life you mentioned one phrase that struck out to me in the book was when you mentioned that still sought to live in anti slavery life. It seemed as if it was more than just helping fugitive slaves escape.  To me it seems more than just assisting escape slaves. Yeah, you know, I think we sometimes you know as historians we sometimes struggle with this terminology of abolitionist right because I think sometimes when people label someone like still an abolitionist. The sense is that okay well we're only talking about one part of his professional life. Because you know, people like still were actually we could more appropriately think about them as activists because they're involved in all sorts of activism. To me I think, when I think about Williams still all the other activism flows from his commitment to fighting the abolitionist cause but I think you're right to say that it's not just about aiding fugitive slaves and it's not even narrowly just about fighting against slavery. There's a sense in which black abolitionists like Williams still understood that the fight for black rights is also a part of the struggle against slavery and that you can't separate the two of these things it's not as if, you know, we've got one fight over here fighting for, you know, black citizenship and on the other hand we've got this fight against slavery, these two things to people like still are indistinguishable.  In part that is for Williams still taking the, the desire to better himself right and I think this is always a part of who still is he always has ambitions to material prosperity to getting a good job to providing for his family to getting himself and providing for the education of his children. So he has these kinds of material desires to improve himself. But he also understands that in doing so, he is fighting against this notion is widespread notion among white Americans at the time, even we should know white Americans who are opposed to slavery right many of them still believe that while African Americans can't be enslaved. They're not necessarily ready for freedom either that there's something wrong with them that there's something that makes them less than citizens. Bettering himself and providing for his family and living this morally upright disciplined life for Williams still is also a way of disproving those ideas, and in doing so, making the argument against slavery and making the argument that once they are emancipated they can they can and shouldn't indeed must be given their full rights as citizens. So for still all those things work together so over the course of his life as he becomes more prosperous as he becomes more educated and he's largely self educated. And he has these, these acts of self making as themselves abolitionist acts that are indistinguishable from the work he is doing in helping fugitives escape from slavery and fighting against the broader institution of slavery. Building off of that. I mentioned several prominent black abolitionists in the book like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Mary and Chad Kerry, just to name a few can't go through all of them but several of them. Some of the names familiar, some of them not, but some of them familiar names. So, what was still his relationship like with these abolitionists. Yeah, so I think on a professional level so what's up maybe about the pressure level and then we can talk a little bit about personal connections. So on a professional level, still is a connector of all of these people so when we think about the underground railroad. So we might think about one end of the underground railroad being Harriet Tub, right, the person who does this remarkable work, even though she has herself escaped to freedom is willing to go back into Maryland to to help family members, escape bondage. So when I think about that as one end of the underground railroad, many of those fugitives from slavery who Harriet Tubman aids, end up coming through Philadelphia, coming through stills office in Philadelphia staying on their way further north. So he connects these people who are doing one end of the work of the underground railroad, with the other end which is for many of them, Canada, right so so many fugitives slave so some will, you know, once they they end up in Pennsylvania they stay. But many of them especially after 1850 feel like Pennsylvania is no longer safe and so they move on further north, New England, you know Massachusetts is somewhat more safe, but it to is a place where the fugitive slave law threatens their freedom. And so many of them make their way to Canada, and significant numbers of them passed through Frederick Douglass his hand so he becomes someone on the other end of the underground railroad helping them cross the border into Canada. So he too is connected to stills network so quite often still will take fugitives who have come, you know perhaps from the Eastern Shore of Maryland via Harriet Tubman's work, and send them on to New York where allies will then send them to Western New York where Douglass will help them across the bridge into Canada. So he's kind of connecting these two ends of the underground railroad. So his personal relationship with these two abolitionists is, is a little bit muddier. So even though he has his professional connection. It's unclear that he, his relationship with Harriet Tubman is unclear. There isn't a lot of evidence that they spend a great deal of time together. It's hard to know with Douglas there's a little bit of a professional jealousy I think. And I think Douglas on a certain level. I think he's on another level right is his fame and and renowned is on another level and I think you know there's there might be an extent to which still begrudges him that eventually Douglas is going to be a little bit perturbed when still doesn't mention him in his published work on the underground railroad so we can see these two men with with egos of their own, maybe having some personal issues. He also had a really good working relationship so so, you know, as both of those men continued their fight for black rights in the in the postbellum period, they work together they appeared on stage together still invited Douglas to Philadelphia to speak and hosted him. So they have, you know, I think maybe professional frictions but also I think a decent working relationship. And she carry she was a close close friend of William still so he was in touch with her, he actually wrote letters that she published in her newspaper. And chided him and other black abolitionists who continued to remain in the United States despite all the evidence that the United States was not welcoming was not a home for African Americans the fugitive slave law dread Scott decision etc. But on a personal level that is the, you know, the abolitionist figure who he maintained not just his professional correspondence with but a genuine personal friendship with her. I could just build off of your comments what I really liked about the book and meeting this biography of William still is it really captures the tensions and debates that still is having with other black activists and the white or black community. One important thread that I found throughout the book is that there were times when there were tensions between William still and other prominent African American leaders as you mentioned like Frederick Douglass, but also regular folks within the African American community. So, people like, I mean these are very obscure people who wouldn't expect to find a history book like I hope I'm pronouncing his name right but democ Carleton, Ellen wells in the Warner case, like these tensions with everyday black folks that spills into something larger so could you speak a little bit more about some of these contentious issues and cases that William still finds himself involved in especially like those three examples. Yeah, so let me just talk more, first I'll talk broadly about these tensions and then talk about these particular wells in the Charlie case. So on a certain level we shouldn't be surprised to know that there were tensions within the abolitionist movement, and that there were tensions within black or between black abolitionists. There are the stakes here are very hot right, the stakes of this fight against slavery the struggle to aid fugitive slaves to fight against the institution of slavery couldn't be higher. And so the fact that people who have disagreements about what is the best way to go about these things, and that those differences led to heated arguments and grudges should be sort of obvious to us. We see that right we see schisms within the abolitionist movement. Okay, and I've argued in this book and elsewhere that often for black abolitionists, the need to come together to aid fugitive slaves often overrode some of those differences so people who might have ideological differences of various sorts would often make those differences aside in order to aid fugitive slaves because that was seen as the most important thing. But nevertheless, I mean there are real differences in grudges and heated words expressed in private and in public you know you read newspapers of this time and they're airing out their dirty law laundry and public. Pretty much I mean still is very much a part of that. I'm in terms of these, these two particular figures who I think you rightly identify as obscure wells and Ellen wells and dinner charlom. This, I think points to an important part of the skills work that I talked about in the book and that is that he is dealing with scarce resources in this work of aiding fugitive slaves. So, all the work that he's doing to help fugitive slaves. You know, giving them shelter for the night is one thing right that that's just he's opening his home or other people are opening their homes, but the underground railroad is also providing food. It's providing medical care. It's providing clothes new clothes in some circumstances because you're going to be moving on via train to New York.  The train tickets in York itself costs money right. All of this stuff has to be paid for and still is constantly raising money to pay for this work. And that's, you know, not that easy either so he's holding public meetings. Some, some abolitionists are traveling across the Atlantic and raising money among British abolitionists. There's never enough right there there's always more demand for this money and so still is placed in this really what he sees as a difficult position where people are asking him to spend this money, but he's trying to do so prudently. Now, the other thing we also know is that this is a period of great economic discrimination against African Americans where free black people across the north are often denied the jobs that are open to white workers that are pushed into the lowest wage sorts of work across the north. And so there's great incentive, you know for some to kind of reach out to this philanthropic network that still has tapped into to, to, you know, basically tell a story that I need this money I'm a fugitive slave. And he doesn't trust everyone so one of the things that he's doing as people come through his office is evaluating their stories. So he's trying to figure out if this person is really who he or she says he is. And in the instance of these two folks, he determines that they're not telling the truth that these are basically con artists who are trying to exploit the, the benevolence of people who are donating to stills network, and not only does still eventually refuse funds to these people, but he discourages other people from aiding them as well. And this. So this obviously angers these two people in particular but also really alienates lots of people because lots of people say who would otherwise be friendly to William still think that he's going too far here that he's being too, you know, careful, you know, he's going overboard and not spreading this money out. And he tends to create some resentment within the movement among people who, you know, feel like he's acting inappropriately here and ultimately well Susan so he had written a letter to allies in Boston, who were inquiring about her she ends up going to Boston to try to raise money there, and he basically sends a letter saying don't trust her I think she's lying, and also be smirching her character in other ways basically saying she's a sort of woman of ill repute and that she's squandering her son he's smoking expensive cigars, and she gets a hold of this letter and sues him for libel, and actually wins so this is one of the ironies of stills life is he spends more than a decade breaking the law in aiding fugitive slaves. And when he actually goes to jail it's for libeling this, this black woman Ellen Wells just for a couple days. So, so does this have any impact on stills leadership in the movements and an impact on the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. So it's hard to say, I mean certainly does so there's certainly those who this comes, it sort of comes in a wave here at the end of the 1850s, there are a series of these controversies where still is kind of squeezing the, the purse strings of the Agilent's committee in a way that begins to anger people and so we do begin to see more and more prominent criticism of William still at this point. Now in part that's because he's become really prominent right, the person who is relatively obscure in 1850 is very well known by 1859. When he's starting to get these criticisms. It's possible that these criticisms helped encourage him to step away from the Pennsylvania anti slavery society. But in really in reality that's also a factor of, you know the Civil War is coming. The fight over slavery is changing so he steps away from multiple reasons but I think certainly for some people these controversies do dim his, his reputation somewhat. So, I'm going to go back to something you mentioned earlier and that is how many of these freedom seekers they received assistance from William still the Philadelphia vigilance committee. They were sent to upper Canada or Canada. So what's interesting about William still in this biography something new that I learned about William still is that still finally makes the journey to upper Canada in 1855. So, why did still finally decide to visit upper Canada, and what's the significance for this trip for still in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. By this point by by the mid 1850s still had had been sending hundreds of fugitive slaves north many of them to Canada. And, you know the idea was that Canada was a place where they could not be captured by slave catchers at least not legally. And so, you know, much is made of of Canada as the promised land, as the place of refuge, lots of abolitionists point to the fact that not only are fugitive slaves, free from this sort of threat there but they also are given citizenship rights so they, they make a great deal of the irony of the fact that black people are granted these rights under, you know the queen that they're denied in the republican land of United States. So, so there's this sort of notion of Canada as a place of refuge, but there's also this counter narrative that people begin to say, you know it Canada is is not a safe place right and they keep they sort of play up this idea that these black communities in Canada are full of poverty and discrimination themselves and that you know, and of course many of these arguments are coming from people who are not sympathetic to still in the Underground Railroad at all. But nevertheless I think there's this desire on stills part to see for himself, right to see for himself. What are the conditions that black people are finding in these communities. Are they the refuge that that he and his allies have made it out to be or are there problems there that would suggest that this isn't an appropriate place for African Americans to find refuge. And so, you know for one of the few times in the 1850s he leaves Philadelphia, he goes on his one of his older brothers accompanies him on this trip and he travels and visits a number of these towns and cities, where we have significant communities. And I would say, largely comes away impressed largely he comes away with the sense that these are thriving black communities. You know, in his reports, he suggests that this is proof that, you know, that free black people can live in harmony with white people that they can create thriving communities that they can improve themselves.  But I think they're also reassuring to him, you know, I think he is somewhat concerned that, you know, this work that he's doing to help people is ending up sending them to a place where maybe there were problems so I think that's really comforting to him to be able to see that firsthand. I think it's also, you know, to him personally it's reassuring to to reconnect with people who he had helped along the road to freedom. So he ends up seeing lots of people in Canada. Later, actually, William Wells Brown will write about this, that still is kind of recognized as a hero in Canada in a way that I think in the United States. He's always a little bit obscure. He's never the prominent figure that maybe some other folks are as he travels around these communities in Canada. He's kind of welcomed as this, this really remarkable figure and I think that probably is reassuring to him as someone who had done a ton of work to make this possible. Surely, made him feel good about himself. So comments maybe think of our discussion a little bit earlier about this idea of living an anti slavery life and how these free black communities in Canada are the embodiment of that. So an example for Americans to see, and maybe, you know, many northerners who may not support slavery but are racially prejudiced, you know, see that African Americans can be in freedom they can be productive citizens in the Republic, who are worthy of full rights. And also to a second theme that I picked up on, as you were talking about these free black communities in Canada is the transnational nature of William stills work so it's more than just William still being based in Philadelphia but these connections that he establishes, not just across like the north and the eastern shore with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, but transnationally as well in Canada, building these connections between free black communities across these two borders which I found, which I found after reading this book incredibly interesting and thinking about William still and the activities of these activists beyond the nation state. Yeah, so I think you know that I think comes back to the I think to me the most important way we can understand stills work and that is that he's a connector right he's someone who connects these disparate communities these disparate individuals who are willing to aid fugitive slaves or fugitive slaves themselves. And, you know, I think, when we think about stills life we do think about the geography of that life and and those connections are facilitated by communications networks right by newspapers by the telegraph by the post office by all these letters that are being connecting him with, we know with communities in Canada with British abolitionists etc, but also connecting him with activists who are in the south who are, you know doing the work in black communities. But then he's also connected via this transportation network right so so we haven't really talked about the mechanics of how people are fleeing slavery. And some of them in the 1850s are fleeing via the technology of transportation that's exploding this period by ships by railroads. And so still is exploiting those improvements in transportation technology as a way of making it possible for people to move out of the south, deeper and deeper in the south right it's one thing to run away if you're from Maryland where you know you can legitimately get some of this distance, even there though of course we know that you know, Douglas doesn't talk about this until well into his life later after the end of the Civil War but he uses the railroad right he uses this transportation network as well, even though he's only coming from Maryland. When we think about the transportation networks that still is tapping into people are coming from Wilmington, North Carolina they're coming from Charleston they're coming from Richmond these places further to the south. And so that's made possible by this, this exploding transportation revolution of this period. So on the sort of material level still is connecting people in these far front places but I think also as you were suggesting this. So Douglas still is unconcerned with the nation's day right because he is of course you know anything he always thinks of himself as an American and he's interested in American politics, but it shows us that the abolitionist movement spans the international borders right it extends across the Atlantic to British abolitionists, it extends into Canada. You know it extends, you know, stills network isn't going south so much but certainly we know from other people's work that the abolitionist work network extends into the Caribbean extends into Mexico so yeah this is a, in some ways still story is very much about a local geography but that local geography is very much connected to this larger global struggle against slavery. There's no connection in the mechanics of the underground railroad itself. So, as you mentioned earlier, William still is this connector as part of a larger, larger network of agents of the underground railroad. So, what were the everyday mechanics of the underground railroad how does it connect people and how do slaveholders respond to this. How do they seek to undermine the underground railroad itself in these connections. Yeah, so, you know, some, some historians have questioned, even using or the, the usefulness of even employing this language of the underground railroad. So some, some historians would go as far as to say that it misrepresent the work of aiding future the slaves to even call it the underground railroad because it suggests a kind of regularity a kind of system that didn't really exist that the underground was really about, you know, this sort of improvisational small scale aid to fugitive slaves and I think there's some truth to that. What I tried to argue in this book is that the, the importance of stills work is taking that local dispersed improvisational kind of aid to fugitive slaves the kind of work that still did as a child right that in you know what his family is aiding fugitive slaves they're not doing so as a part of any regular network of the underground railroad in fact the term wasn't even in use at that point. By the time still comes onto the scene. Abolishness in all sorts of places have recognized that there was some need for vigilance committees right which are in operation all over the United States as ways of kind of giving some structure to this effort to aid fugitive slaves. And, and that's really what stills doing so to think about the mechanics of how his job works. So, I like to talk about it as you know it's a work that he's mostly doing from his desk, which doesn't sound that exciting right we are familiar with the stories of fugitive slaves themselves were stories you know the stories about Harriet Tubman and the kind of drama of that end of the underground railroad and so to turn to William still sitting at his desk doesn't seem all that exciting. But what he's doing at that desk I think it's really remarkable because what it means is it's connecting these far flung activists who are in stills orbit and helping make their work more successful. So on any given day still might have a fugitive slave walking into his office asking for his help right that person had come, not knowing who still was necessarily but most likely that person had shown up in Philadelphia had looked for someone who was sympathetic, almost certainly a free black person in Philadelphia, who then knew still was the man to go to, and, and so still is connected that way still then is able to get this person's story. Give him or her shelter, food, medical care whatever and send them on further north. Now, sending them further north was complicated to because you couldn't just put them on a train to New York City. New York City was not safe for fugitive slaves as historians have documented. So they needed to have someone meeting them there so still had to be in contact with abolitionists in New York who could meet that person. Often this was done via the telegraph. So still is a part of stills work still is also in contact with allies who are in kind of like the region so so you know Thomas Garrett is an ally in Wilmington, Delaware. William Whipper and Steven Smith and Lancaster County. They are also helping shelter fugitive slaves, but who are then sending them to still who then will move them on to New York and so he becomes the center of this node of all these different activists who know that sending them to still is the best way to get them on to the north. You know he's also going to have connections with people sailing in and out of Southern ports so I talked about this earlier about fugitive slaves finding refuge on ships. Often that happened when the captain of that ship when there was some ally on that ship right so it's possible to still way without the knowledge of anybody who is working on that ship but but less likely. Most often either the captain or somebody who was working on that ship was in on it was able to conceal that person. That too is often done with the coordination of William store at least giving still knowledge that these people would be showing up in Philadelphia. So you know he's, he's, he's connecting all these people he's reaching out to them. There are instances and I talked about this in the book there are some instances of still actually coordinating people directly going in and helping fugitive slaves but that's far often, or that's far less common it's most often kind of he is receiving these. You know these people who are being sent his way. So the other thing, you know I've alluded to this. He keeps records of all these people coming in through his office so he does so for a couple different reasons, one is to document how we spending money. So still is always and really everyone who was involved in this kind of work was from time to time. So on how they were spending the money that was entrusted to them still wants to be able to prove that he's wisely spending this and he makes it clear that people of good will can inspect his books. That is, you know people who are allies are welcome to come in and look at how he's been spending his money. All of that is, is a way of not only defending his own reputation, but also of continuing to encourage people to give him money right if people think you're misspending money they're going to be less likely to donate that to you so all of this is a part of still encouraging people to continue to patronize the vigilance committee. The second reason I think that he keeps these records of everyone who comes through his office is that he has his own remarkable story and open the book with the story of reconciliation with his long lost brother so his, his mother when she fled I'd left behind the two eldest still boys. And eventually becomes free and comes north to find his family and kind of remarkably shows up in stills office and we have this reconciliation between these brothers who have never met each other. This experience still begins to really think about how we know of course that that slavery itself tears apart black families, but ironically, running away from slavery also tears about part black families right so for many of these fugitives from slavery. The, the brave act of running away is also a kind of traumatic act of leaving family members behind. What still hoped was that keeping these records would help some of those families recover those who had been lost. So when we look at the records he keeps, they're not just about dollars and cents that are being spent. They also have descriptions they have names they have stories about where people are coming from where they're going. And I think all of this is, is a way of using these stories to ultimately help bring these families back together. Speaking of families you actually have a viewer who is watching us right now who is the descendant of stills brother and he's asking us about the family of still that may have been left behind what happened to the family is still that was left behind. So I think I think this question is alluding to the story I was just telling about Peter Peter Friedman he eventually takes the name still to once he rejoins his family. Yeah, so the first time. So, when stills father purchases his freedom, 11 still. He goes north and for whatever reason, Sydney later charity is unable to purchase her freedom. So she makes the decision to run away and when she does the first time she brings with her her four young children two boys and two girls. And then after a few months, she's recaptured so all five of them are recaptured and dragged back into bondage in Maryland. And the master in question is really suspicious and locks her up in the Garrett of the house for a long time. Eventually she convinces him that she's resigned to her fate and she's not going to run away again. And of course, almost as soon as he gives her liberties again, she runs away. But what she, you know, she realized was that running away the second time was going to be even harder than the first time that she was going to be a target from the very beginning that there would be lots of slave catchers out for her and the children. She makes the decision to leave these two older boys behind the two girls were much younger and she felt like she had to bring them, but she felt like she would have a better chance for at least the three of them. If it was just the three of them and she left these two boys behind Levin junior and Peter. You know, this is to me, you know, among this is a book with lots of heartbreaking stories.  Thinking that she would probably never see these boys again now one of them she never did see again Levin. She didn't see but Peter was able to live into adulthood to save up money. And eventually, as I said, head north to try to find this family that he really didn't know at all. So yeah she had left these two boys behind and one of them never never saw again. I was just curious. So you mentioned about how abolitionist activists like William still use the technology the period the transportation revolution steamboats that are coming into the Port of Philadelphia, building these communication networks but slaveholders are also responding to this as well. I mentioned in the book about how slaveholders in the slaveholding interest in the government in North Carolina will smoke out ships though they'll send smoke in the ships to prevent enslaved people from catching a ship up north, or another instance they'll use the telegraph lines. So the catchers will communicate with the city of the law enforcement in, let's say Philadelphia or New York to say hey, there might be an enslaved person on their way beyond a look up for this individual. So, I was just curious so since slaveholders are, you know, they're responding back. They instituted a new more stringent fugitive slave act in 1850. So I was just curious, how successful was William still and the vigilance committee. Were there any instances of failure. So, um, yeah I think I think you've hit on something that's really important and understanding this story that that this is a kind of. I don't know there's a there's like a mirror image of all the work that William still is doing, we might see him as the kind of shadow of this professional and political organization that slave catchers are doing so the business of slave catcher catching is a business in this period there are firms that are committed to this, lots of money is being made by people who are recapturing fugitive slaves in Philadelphia, lots of police officers are doing this work they become kind of, you know, freelance slave catchers they're able to use their expertise and their connections in Philadelphia to do this work. There are firms in places like Baltimore and Richmond who this is the work they do. They are, you know, hiring agents they know how to get these things done. On the government side right you talked about you mentioned the fugitive slave law but it's important to note that that fugitive slave law is itself a response to state laws that have been passed in places like Pennsylvania to, you know, to do lots of things to protect free black people but also to protect fugitive slaves to make it harder at least to capture people who should not be considered fugitive slaves right to protect people who are legally free. But what it adds up to is it makes it harder to recapture fugitive slaves, and these laws are being passed all over the north these are the so called personal liberty laws. And so it's in response to those government defenses of free black people and fugitive slaves that we get this federal law that is, you know, is making it easier to capture fugitive slaves by making it a federal responsibility rather than a state and local responsibility. So all of it of course is about money right and of course that money is creating great incentives for people to kidnap so there are lots of people, lots of free people who are kidnapped into slavery. Often it's indistinguishable that the business of kidnapping is indistinguishable from, you know, legitimate legal slave catching the people who are doing this slave catching are often not all that concerned if they, if they grab somebody who is legally free. So, so there's a sort of like constant struggle for who can, can out organize the other right who can be on the lookout for the other and, and, and adapt in ways that keep them one step ahead of the other side in the struggle and so that's, I think a really dynamic in this book, in terms of you know how successful William still is I think he's remarkably successful which isn't to say that slave catchers are, you know, never capture fugitive slaves. They do. But I think when we, we look at the scales here, you know, far more fugitive slaves who passed through stills hands end up succeeding in getting further north and end up falling into the hands of slave catchers. It's also very rare for fugitive slaves who come into the stills orbit to, to die from illness or from some sort of injury along the way happens but it's really uncommon so he's successful in, in kind of making sure that they're healthy enough to move on as well I think in this, this sort of struggle between the forces of slave catchers and slavery on one hand and, you know, the forces of the vigilance committee on the other, the vigilance committee is remarkably successful in this period. The underlying, underlying thing with the abolitionist movement is this question of violence and utility of violence. And one story that really stuck out to me in this book was john brown, who leads a planned insurrection of enslaved people it fails. So he seeks to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, where he is playing isn't successful. So what is stills relationship to john Brown and the question of violence. So, you know, going back to something we're talking about earlier, one of the fissures in the abolitionist movement has as we as historians know is about this question of violence right and that the sort of Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement is non resistant doesn't believe in violence as a useful and, you know, there's another, you know, there's a sort of lots of abolitionists who critique that. I think recently, you know, Kelly Carter Jackson of course is the historian who is who has most been most illuminating and writing about this and I think she makes a pretty massive case that for black abolitionists that alliance with Garrisonian non resistance is one of convenience that that very few abolition or black abolitionists are genuinely ideologically committed to this idea that, you know, you shouldn't use you as a tactic. I would, I mean, still is, you know, throughout his life, an ally and an admirer of William Lloyd Garrison but when we look at his personal correspondence he even jokes about this so there's one one letter where he sort of, he's talking about someone who he's helped from slavery and they used a weapon of some sort, and he jokes about his own quote non resistance position I think he and most people who aided fugitive slaves recognize that there had to always be this willingness to use violence and when it comes down to it, his so so ultimately john brown does try to enlist still he asks for stills advice he meets with still and a few other prominent black Philadelphians to solicit I think, you know, both their advice on his raid on Harper's very but I think would very much have liked some of these men to play a more active role in the raid than they did still ultimately refuses to do so but it's not because he objects to the proposed violence it's that, you know, strategically he doesn't think this is the best approach. So I think that's, you know, still as a practical man, and I think most people who aided fugitive slaves recognize that they had to be practical. And in, in this regard, I think they recognize that violence could be an important tool in aiding fugitive slaves and certainly still prides his assistance to the folks in Christiana who rise up and protects fugitive slaves there he he talks about, you know, other instances in which people who he helps along the way use violence in in their own self defense, even if still himself is not someone that we know you know used violence in that regard he certainly recognized its utility. I have minutes left and I have so many more questions about William still because I enjoyed so much reading about this biography but when I end with one final question and that is so when you get talks about William still or when you teach about abolition in the underground railroad in the classroom. Are people familiar with who William still was, or how well like he's known. And if they're not, you know, why is that. I think William still been forgotten among so many Americans, especially since he's published like a wide reaching book, I would say, you just say it's best selling book but he circulated book. So, I think, I think it depends on where I'm giving talks so so I live in Philadelphia, and this is a book that said in Philadelphia I think when I give talks in Philadelphia people are far more likely to have heard of William still outside of Philadelphia. He's not very well known but even here in Philadelphia I would say that people maybe kind of a general sense of who he might be but but he certainly doesn't have the profile that I think he deserves and there are a couple reasons for that and one of them is that still himself didn't do a good job of promoting itself right I mean I think still there are times in his life when he is accused of being a self promoter but I think when we look at the general course of his career. I think he says it is true he's far more inclined to give other people credit. When we look at his book so you rightly know that he writes this magnificent massive book 800 pages almost about the Underground Railroad. As a biographer, it's a thrilling book to read but it's somewhat frustrating because it says very little about William still, I think it's by design I think you know still wrote that book, wanting to make it clear that the center of his story was not him but others who worked with him, but the center of the story were fugitive slaves themselves and he really tries to highlight that story in that book it is a book not about the Underground Railroad despite its title. It's about the fugitives who themselves are the prime actors right still is just helping them do the work that they themselves have initiated. And that's one reason that that still just basically hasn't to his own horn hasn't promoted himself he doesn't write a narrative of his own life for example. The other reason is I think in this, I've touched on a little bit earlier that his work is a little bit harder for us to understand it seems kind of not that exciting right. You know I said earlier that much of stills work is done sitting at his desk when when his brother walks into his life at the start of this book. He is sitting at his desk. This isn't the pose that we connect with high drama the way that you know we think about these other characters we mentioned, Frederick Douglass whose life is filled with drama he's this amazing compelling speaker and writer. Still, you know he's this clerk he's this guy who is is doing this seemingly mundane work. Same thing of Harriet Tubman right she's got this obviously dramatic story. That's not still. What I've tried to do in this book is to explain to readers why they should care about this work that William still was doing as mundane as it might seem as unimportant as it might seem it was absolutely vital and without stills work. All this other work all this high drama would have I'm not going to say it wouldn't have meant anything of course it would have. All for far more likely to succeed right so stills work was sort of taking this everyday work of the vigilance committee and using it to to make everybody else's work more successful. The big takeaway is that still understood himself as not this lone heroic individual but as a part of a collective struggle that he always understood this as a collective struggle not as an individual story. And all that notes will end here and thanks everybody for joining us. Thanks to the National Archives for hosting this event and thank you to Andrew for this enriching conversation about this book this valuable book. It's valuable biography on William still. So, thank you and thanks for inviting me. Thank you so much.


Everybody forced here ripping. It's 21 22 immaculate basketball hobby five bucks full case number 27 Teared random team style take a look at the results by grab some water here Thanks for joining everybody. You can always find those results of late in sports cards comm. There's a link in chat as well. Here we go Come on logo man. We've ripped Was it 27 K? This is a bit 27 the case. Come on. Yeah. I mean it's not that crazy. It's a low. It's a logo man But you set the tone maybe maybe when we do pull one of the just a gigantic one Luca logo man.  Let's go lucky number 27 There's a Luca right there Yeah, not quite a not quite a logo man of Luca there rookie jersey day run sharp Nets 47 of 99 a Nice game use three color patch for Chicago DeMar DeRos in 14 of 25 Yeah, so close base to 99 very close Jazz on the RPA here Jared Butler is 62 of 99 There we go jazz You like jazz Modern marks nine of ten Danilo Galanari Hawks, dude. Just start throwing pizza. Yeah Patch auto Timberwolves Carl Anthony towns eight of 32 on the jersey number parallel Nice kat three color game you or game. Yeah game use patch. What's trying to say? You're Timberwolves Kyle M Noice towns There we go. We'll get that mad game worn 30 to 32. It's a nice one.  It's really get that like platinum foil on the jersey number parallel. I don't hate it. It's just uh It's like the same one as the the one of one foil I guess that might be a little different. I don't know you gotta pull local man to compare 57 and 99 Hawks Trey young Another Nets rookie jersey of day run sharp 33 of 99 people right here. This is really cool Look at that dual game use patch clay Thompson to marge a rosin number 11 10 of 11 Both number 11's there. That is really cool Game worn dual patch is going to be random at the end Between the warriors and the bulls Warriors Eric R bulls. I'm a D. That's really cool, man Dude, if that was 11 of 11. Well, we were so close Good luck to the dubs and the bulls. That's really cool Jumbo jersey standout memorabilia pascal siacum raptors There is a ding here. I'm gonna send a box and wrapper. It's right on the frame Not even a ding. It's it isn't more like just a big bad ding bad dent Shadow box signatures for these Celtics is Robert Williams the third 22 of 99. Nice time lord Yeah, probably please for the car like that. Yeah And a herber jones rookie introductions auto 61 of 99 pelicans We go herb herb jones Got more immaculate breaks tomorrow everybody 10 a.m. Start time with kenzie and then sam's in the evening as well Streaming all day saturday for you 10 a.m. Start time again 6 of 10 derrius garland cavaliers Hawks game use jersey john collins 12 of 99 It's almost your birthday herman one week Game use jersey 76ers james harden 25 out of 99. I believe that's a net jersey It is a net jersey game worn though.  Dang it's not as good then. I know There's no point that they're lying That's like that's shot down You guys if you're gonna top her up like a daytime though Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, if that if that does happen Yeah, she can make it then She's changed on her own, right? 46 and 49 bold zack levine The thing old jersey one. Oh my god. Yes, he would be epic. He'd be so mad. I think I love it Jersey garden magic co-anthony 7 of 99 I don't know if I want to start that. I do I totally do The magic co-anthony game use jersey Jumbo nuggets jersey nikola yokic 84 of 99 bugs Into the autos now nets kessler edwards inaugural ink 31 of 99 Pacers shadow box signatures steven jackson number 21 of 99 There you go.  Yeah, I think he'll turn there. I think she's gonna get healthy and he'll get some more stability He's still got a pretty high ceiling to be a starting point guard Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens That's I think it's all a health of sucks when he plays we see these flashes where he's just a really good starting point guard That can shoot We'll see we'll see green one of five color match robert williams the third celtics Time lord dual jersey rockets rookies jaylen green and alpren shengun 14 of 75 Trey murphy the third jersey number rookie patch card 24 at 50 pelicans sweet jersey number patch there Past and present signatures for the bucks bobby portis 8 of 49 bucks legends Got an immaculate ink auto 9 of 25 spurs d yonte murray and on the back of the break Scores club auto 10 of 10 wizards bradley biel mice second-tier hit for washington there Yeah, I guess I am on tiktok sometimes to follow Nice brad biel. There you go wizards. Give me a sec. We'll do a random and a recap So this is a really unique card here. It's pretty cool Dual patch game use clay thompson to marty rose and the number 11's 10 of 11 so close to having the 11 of 11 Good luck warriors bowls on the random two and two four times top team gets the card one two three and four Bulls get the card. Congrats. Chicago. All right, so again one to the bulls here Thompson and de rosen Got trey murphy the third jumbo number patch there shengun and green dual relics rockets Nikola yokich col ampany james harden john collins pascal siakam What's up the shorts They run sharp there's a base trey young in the recap Another patch to rosen deyron sharp again autos now bradley biel to 10 Deonte murray as a spur bobby portas bucks steven jackson pacers kessler edwards nets tim hardaway warriors mitch richmond kings hey herbert jones pelicans robber williams the third celtics denilo galanari hawks rpa jared butler jazz rookie introductions auto jail and sucks magic 18 of 75 Scores club john marant auto to 25 And patch auto carl anthony towns eight of 32 for the timberwolves Yeah, not the best case still had some nice hits for some teams in there Thanks again everybody moving on to football now


OOF CHILDHOOD So let's see how this goes. We're going back in time to OOF's childhood. Oh my god, so that should be awesome and interesting Okay, so last time we played the beta, which was only like a 30 second like gameplay video was so short 13 warning Please read this game includes dows towns gore and jump scares if you are under the age 13 I would recommend you exit out of this game if you wish to continue click anywhere tap to begin boy I'm gonna play this.  Okay, let's continue 1971 seven years before the great oof bombing the evil cycle oof or oof and has been hunting down OOF's parents OOF's whole life finally OOF and caught OOF's parents on the side on the road and murdered them What's this guy's evil man? OOF was only seven years old at the time Now he was all alone in the hands of OOF and with no parents to protect him Okay, so keep oof safe and make it back to your time. Oh my god.  Oh no. He killed the mama oof and papa oof. Oh, he's crying right here by himself This is so sad man. Let's get a ramp in the chat for my boy press F To pay respects to oof and his parents. Oh my god. Look at oofing. Oh my god Nothing you can do now boy. Well, he's just a seven year old He really can't do anything your parents have been defending themselves and protecting you for years Well, that's what parents do man, but now it's time for you and your babysitter or whatever to come with me and noof What what does that mean now oof stop crying like a baby and get in the car before I oof you boy You too stranger wait. No, I don't want to get in the car. Oh my god. It seems like we have no other choice Okay, you're gonna nothing man. Oh Later that night at oof is hot. Oh god. Okay, so we're trapped in this cage and someone broke us out. Hey, what's up oof? So my boy looks like this is this guy is a psychopath Yeah, you ain't got to say that twice man. He killed your parents by the time I move I'm my weight out of the cage in my father's pocket knife. Oh my god This boy is legit and I knocked out oof noof the assistant with the stone. Oh, so this is the assistant to the evil ooftron Realistic gaming now. Yeah, you like my name. Thank you. Noof will be absent and we don't have the car key So I guess we have to look for the car key so we can escape. Oh god.  I don't want to go in oof his house I think noose dropped a flashlight somewhere you could use Okay, I meet you inside. All righty, man. No wait wait.  Oh, here it is. Voila Can I so we have a flashlight so at least it's not as dark. Can we just run away in the car? Take me home No, okay. Gosh, okay. Why can't we just hot wire the car and get out of here, man? Oh My god, it's just how to make complicated Okay, so off we go into oof his house. Oh my god, what What in the world was that?  I just heard like scary noise. Oh my god Okay, so there's definitely something else besides us here, and it is not Oh my god, where's that thing? Oh my god. Oh my god. It came run. He's chasing us. No, go in here. Oh My god, we barely made it. Hey, what's up oof? There you are. I've been lucky for you man. Did you see that thing out there? This place is a maze. Oh wonderful. Okay. I'm so glad you found me and neither of us got here didn't buy zoof Okay, so by a zoo what is realistic gaming? You don't know what a zoo is but I assume it's that thing that was chasing me Those are oof's guard dogs. I guess you would call them We better get back to finding the car key. Let's split up to make it quicker. No Every time we split up everything goes wrong, man Okay, so I don't know if I want to go this way because there's blood on the floor Oh god, here goes nothing bad. Oh, I know if we step in like in the no Game over eating by a zoo. You see that's what I was talking about We have to be careful every turn we make because there's gonna be zoops everywhere. Oh My god, okay, so take two I guess all right you guys so we're back to this part where I took the wrong turn I really didn't want to go in that way, but I mean I just went for oh, there's a ladder Okay, it's missing a piece of stair. I mean a ladder right here. I don't know if we can climb up Wait, how can we get up here? Maybe oh my god. I see who's up there. Yo, help me man. Give me a hand Why is he not helping? Okay, that we got trapped in there. I was about to say hello somebody help me Okay, so how do we get up there? Is there a way to get up there you guys? I think we have to collect the ladder maybe oh My god, okay, he's not helping out That guy is being that we were friends man. Okay, let's go back this way My god, there's so many doors Okay, I don't know what path to take Please don't come out zoo Please don't let there be a zoo fear. Oh My god, I'm scared to make turns Okay, everything seems to be Going good so far There's a blocked door right here. Oh No, I feel like we're gonna get killed. Oh, no, we're not nice Gotta be kidding me We gotta eat it by a zoo forget This space is just crazy man. Okay, so there was like an invisible ladder there, but the zoo popped out So I don't know what to do. We have to find a way. I mean we found that ladder, but it's missing the middle part So Maybe we just got to keep trying. Oh never mind. What happened? Hello, what? Okay, nevermind.  All right, you guys So we're not definitely not gonna go to the right because we just saw what happened. Oh, this has to be the correct way There you go. Thank you. What okay? Oh, it's about to say what it's like dead end up here But we little do we know that it makes us go up here. Okay, please don't let there be a zoo found here Oh, is that like a checkpoint? All right, so let's go check out this door. I remember there was a door down here this hallway That was shut and that plate must have opened it and wallah here it is Oh, and that's a missing link that we needed Okay, so now we can finally go up the ladder Because we collected the piece for it. So let's go back this way and climb up the ladder Hopefully, I don't forget where it's at because I tend to forget the small things a lot Where is it at? Oh my god, it's gone. Oh, yeah, but we seen that he's up there So he's gonna meet us up here Here it is. Yes. Hey, what's up? Oh? My god, how wait how did it get? Oh my god, we're in oofens room Oh, and here goes nothing. We got to get the key without waking up oofen. Oh My god. Oh my god, how do you not wake up right there? Okay, that was so close So how do we get around? Okay, let's go this way Jesus Christ. Okay. Let's go. Let's go. I got the key man. Okay, great You got the car key without waking up oofen. Let's get out of here this place The crates gives me the creeper After you escape oofens house, what happened boy this way hurry. Oh, this is not be good I miss you quickly hop in the car lunch. Where are you taking us? Where is he taking?  I'm taking us through time. Nice to see you again realistic gave me Thank you my boy boy You just say he's gonna take us back to your time or something. I don't know I can put down some music Maybe you guys will enjoy it. You know supposed to come out in six years. I thought you'd enjoy it What what is this music I never heard this before I'm confused. Hey, hey, hey, he's playing music from the future. Oh My god, what's happening?  Hey, let me get lit It's like the music from the Guardians of the Galaxy Hey, hey, okay, so glim is driving us off into the sunset. I suppose there unless we're just gonna burn Oh god, where's why is it all yellow? Oh 1999 oh My god, so we're legit time-traveling right now. This is awesome.  Whoa, this is amazing. You got that right glim. I mean, oh God, there we go Oh, like we see the Sun over there our alligator. So is that really it with the utron? Is he really dead? I Don't know you guys. I See the Sun But that's probably like a time portal or something. I doubt it's the Sun because we wouldn't burn. Oh God, okay Hey, okay, please let us go Nothing happened Cross your fingers. I knew something was gonna happen rockets at us Yes, oops knife What do we do? Do I have to like go? Do I have to go do something to this dude over here? Why is it? Why is nothing happening? I took off his shield No Why is it going down? I think I'm supposed to like cut the wires and nothing's happening I'm gonna shoot him because I'm gonna die if that And that's the case, but maybe that paddle over there turn green. Let's go check it out Because it's been red this whole time. No, it didn't wait. No, it did it. Okay, you've drawn glim Do you have any plans for me? Do you have any other ideas for me that I can do so I can defeat this guy?  All right, so you're not a helpful Okay, what about you? Just staring at the car like what is that supposed to happen guys? I mean I'm right here. I'm trying. I keep a while.   I don't know guys. I I suppose the game is broken because like we took the force field off but We couldn't do anything else. He just kept shooting over and over She makes those sense And the pads were both red So we couldn't turn those green and I was going up to I was talk trying to talk to glam and Oof and nothing happened. So I don't know guys. Thank you guys for watching If you guys know what what's supposed to happen after this. Let me know in the comments Because I'm just gonna go crazy if I play this one more time because I've tried it like a million times already But thank you guys for watching. Thank you guys for the main support If you guys enjoyed the video make sure to slap the like button if you're new to the channel Make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell and I will see you guys in the next one. Bye


Hey guys so welcome back to my channel. First off I apologize for the poor video appearance. It's my day off and I'm just too lazy to set things up just to get this quick video out. So I want to talk about volunteering going to Houston. I've been getting a lot of questions from you guys asking if I am going to Houston to be a nurse there to help out. And first off I want to say that my heart goes out to everyone in Houston in the surrounding areas. I've been watching the news and seen pictures and it just has totally rocked everyone's world over there and I just can't fathom like what it would be like to be there. I can only imagine and I know a lot of people are struggling and there's been a lot of people who have stepped up. Nurses, firemen, policemen, emergency personnel, just the regular old person in the grocery store have stepped up to really help out and I think that's tremendous. So a lot of you guys saw on my Instagram that I signed up through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry website which I will have linked down below to be a nurse volunteer for Houston, the state of Texas, whatever if they were to need me. So I did sign up. I have not heard anything back yet. I'm not 100% sure how that whole process works as far as how they select people or you know I'm assuming it's just a volunteer thing. I don't know if they would cover like your travel costs any of that. So I'm not sure on the specifics of that but I have signed up. I have not heard anything back yet. I really would love to go and help out volunteer whatever I could do. I think it would be a tremendous experience. I think it'd be very humbling and if I were called and it worked out then I absolutely would go. I know you also can sign up through the Red Cross which I'll have linked down below. I guess the reason I haven't done this yet is because the Red Cross I was reading requires a nine-day contract where you would be working for about seven days but you'd have the one day for travel there and one day for travel home in your travel costs and like lodging all that is covered. However, I can't commit a full nine days at least not at this point to go to Houston or the surrounding areas because I do have a job here that I have to work at and I know a lot of people are at my work are trying to help out and go and but we've been so short staffed at work that if I was leaving to go help it out in Houston which would be a wonderful thing and I know that I could like really dedicate my time and help out I would also be leaving behind my own work and my co-workers and leave them potentially to be struggling as well. So I know it's a different type of struggling and suffering but nonetheless I don't want to inconvenience my nursing job to go and do something else if that makes sense. I really really do want to go volunteer but I want it to be able to work out and all of that. So I hope the answer to some of your guys' questions again I'll have those links down below you can sign up to volunteer even if you're not a nurse if you're a nurse practitioner or CNA I think just the regular role whatever you do you can sign up and you put in like your certifications that you have whether it's your nursing license or maybe you have your CPR or your first aid you put in all of your skills when you sign up at least through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry website. It asks me a bunch of questions as far as like what my skills are and experience is so if you are wanting to sign up go check out those links again my heart goes out to everyone that's in Texas that's suffering from this or the surrounding areas I know it's not just Houston even though they keep saying Houston on the on the news but I will help out in any way that I can so thank you guys for watching this video make sure you give this a thumbs up and yeah subscribe to my channel I'll see you guys next time bye


Hey everybody, it's Brian, and welcome to the 11th year tutorial. If you've been following along, we have teachers, students, and classes, and those are also database tables, and we're reading and writing out of the database through models. We've talked a little bit about model view controller architecture. I want to talk a little bit more about the views, specifically this little operations menu over to the right here. You notice how when you click on things, it changes.  Well, how do we modify this list? I mean, what's really going on here? Because we have a little page that we're going to be playing around with called teacher slash test, but we want to get that in this list here. So how do we modify that? Where is this actually coming from? All right, let's open this up. Now, if you haven't been following along, let me digress here a little bit. In the teacher's controller, you're going to have to allow the test view and then make an actual action for the test and then render the test page. All right, so looking at the teacher's index, you'll see this menu right here. Remember how I said, you know, if you aren't very good at arrays in PHP, you're going to need to learn them because Yee is very array dependent. Almost everything in Yee boils down to an array at some point. This is a prime example. This menu array, and then we've got this create teachers and manage teachers, and you can see how it's got the label, my mouse work, label, and the URL. So the labels create teachers, the URLs create. So sure enough, if we go to the teacher's index, you've got create manage, and you can see if create goes to the teacher slash create route. So that's the menu right there. One of my little pet peeves about Yee, I understand why they did it this way, but I think they could have automated it a little better, is if you open some of these up, like let's actually go to admin, you'll see that it's different, meaning if you want to add a menu item to each one of these, you have to open each view and add it in manually. What a pain. Let me show you what I mean here. So we want to add our little test view in there. Call it test, and it's going to go to the test route. Now I should note right now that if you wanted to go to a different one, it would be controller slash and then whatever the view is, but we're in the same controller, so you don't need the controller. So we go here, and now we have the test on our index, and if you click it, sure enough, it goes to the teacher slash test. But notice how if you click create or manage, test suddenly goes away. What a pain. So we're going to just real quickly, through the magic of copy and paste, add that in. Now in case you're wondering why did they do it this way, well you notice how you have different operations. For example in the update.php, you can list create, view, and manage. Well sometimes you're going to need to be able to actually have an object. For example in update.php you'll see view teachers, URL, and then you're actually passing an array to the URL, which is the view, in this case view, we're just viewing the page, and the ID, which is the model ID teachers, or you could have just said primary key. So when you click on this, it's going to take you to the view, and it's going to have a query string of ID with the primary key, and let's demonstrate that real quick. Let's actually just click on Bob Smith here, yeah you see how it's right there. So if we click on that, go to update, this is where we actually were, and I don't know if you can see down in the status bar, it says teacher slash view ampersand ID equals seven, because that's the record ID right here. So if you click that, boom, we're going to go to teachers view, ampersand ID seven. So that is also how you would put a query string in there, pretty simple, it's just an array. Let's review it real quick again. The menu items, each one can have a label, a URL, and there's other properties we won't get into, but in the URL you can also tell it, you know, the view that you want to go to, in this case view, and the query string, and you can add other attributes in here too if you really wanted to. So now we've got the test link on just about every page that we click here, that's how you get it in there. Now you notice how when we go to test, there's nothing there, well how do we manipulate this? How do we get it to the other pages, the same layout? All right, so what we're going to do very simply is we're just going to say, copy this, go to, if I can find it, test PHP, and you should know, unless you're actually passing the model to this, you should actually get rid of that, simply because that turns it into a variable, and we're not passing a model to it, we're just rendering a static page, so let's actually get rid of some of these things here. Let's say we just want, yeah, index, and we shouldn't go to test because that's the current page. Now when we do that, ooh, what's up? Oh yes, see we're not passing the model here, so what we've got to do is go back in here, my bad, I fumbled a little bit, go back here, there we go, and we should actually change that title to test real quick just because I'm being that picky, if I can find my icon, there it is, test teachers, all right, so that is that, so one thing I also want to discuss while we're on the topic of layouts and we're talking about all this gobbly gook is what is really the difference between column one and column two, we touched about that briefly in a previous tutorial, let me close a bunch of these just to clean up some clutter here, if you go to, whoops, layouts, yeah, just views, layouts, you'll see column one, column two, main.php, open up main, we've done this before and this is our actual template for the every page, now there's column one, column two, what are really the distinctions here, well column one is if you're just using one column, column two is if there are two columns, all right, I know that wasn't very helpful, so let's go a little deeper into this, let's crank open our controller here, whoops, controller, you see how it says in the teacher's controller public layout equal slash slash layouts column two, what we're saying is by default we want two columns, now if we change that to column one just as demonstration, it'll default everything in teachers to one column, notice how boom our little operations menu disappeared, that's the power of layouts, I believe that's called a sub layout, our main layout is this page, you're seeing this beautiful web application we got going and our sub layout is in here, so let's actually go back, change this back to column two and there you go, now if we look at those individual layouts, you can see column one is just, you know, begin content and then it's loading the main layout, all of the beautiful web template that we got going on here and then it begins the content, the content of course would be the view and then it ends the view, whereas column two pretty much same thing, you're loading the main layout, but then you've got a couple other goodness in here, you've got the content and you've got just basically two divs, there's the first one and then here's the second one and notice the second one is a span five last, that's just our cascading style sheet and you can actually change the title here, so you can just, instead of operations we'll call it goodness and then items, this is the this menu, that's how it's getting that array out of the individual view, so if we go down to the index, see this menu right here, so you're just assigning a variable at that point, pretty simple, pretty easy to understand, whoops, and HTML option classes, you know, that's pretty much just setting the cascading style sheet, so you can change the way it looks, the way it functions, pretty neat huh, all right, so that in a nutshell is layouts and sub layouts and if you've been following along you should have a few items and teachers and now you have this beautiful test view


Good morning, everyone. My name is Greg Lardy and I'm currently serving as Vice President for Agricultural Affairs here at NDSU. On behalf of all of our faculty, staff, and scientists throughout our entire system, I want to welcome you to the 2020 Field Days. With the pandemic, we've had to pivot and create these virtual Field Days as many of you have in your production schemes as well. We certainly want to thank you for your patience as we develop these programs. I'm standing here in a field north of 19th Avenue in Fargo and in the background you can see our new veterinary diagnostic laboratory. We want to give a special thank you to our North Dakota Legislature for their support of all of our ag research and extension projects that they've funded throughout the past couple of bienniums. We're certainly proud of the agricultural heritage that we have. I want to give a special thank you to all of our faculty, staff, and scientists who've worked hard through the pandemic to continue to deliver top quality research and extension programs to our constituents. These virtual Field Days will give you a chance to connect to a variety of different research projects that are going on across our system. We're proud of the local research that our Research Extension Center Network does and the connections that they have to our main campus scientists. On behalf of all of our faculty and staff, welcome to the 2020 Field Days. And on behalf of everyone, thank you for attending.


Rydyn nol. Rydyn ni'n gwybod hi. Rydyn ni'n gwybod chi o modd i Uiwn Nogolydd. Rydyn ni'n gwybod hi o modd i ymdrygu o'r tîm pannu cynnydd gyd o'r plwyau tusawdd ar gyfer weithi. Rydyn ni nol byd wedi ei busnes i'r nid o'r ystod. Nawr rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r Ady Appleton. Rydyn ni i fewn i nu ddwy wedi'u Twfyn, yn gallu cofodur y can. Rydyn ni i bobl i'n gwybod i'r hyn i. mae'r bwysig ewn gwahanol yn ysgol iawn. Mae'r bwysig hefyd wedi dweud i gael gwahanol. Mae ymlaen i'w yma, rydyn ni i gael cymdeithasio chi wneud gwych i gocardasio ar gyfer, iddynt wedi wnael grannu nhw, a'r anggl yn Eil's API. Hynny i'n dwylo bwysig y cwbl y mynd, mae wedi gwaith ymlaen a hynny mwyn amddangor o eu rhan o grannu cymdeithasio ar gyfer ymlwg. Roedd eich bod ar gyfer ei gweld, ydy'r cyfan gyda Maen nhw'n gweithio. Ychydig o'r cyfan cyfan gyda'r cyfan, y cyfan cyfan gyda'r ysgrifennu hwn, felly mae'n meddwl y cerdwyr sy'n gwneud eich cyfan cyfan cyfan gyda'r cyfan cyfan cyfan cyfan. Dwi'n dweud yw'r cyfan o'r dashbordd. Wryn o'r cyfan cyfan cyfan cyfan gŵr, yma'r gweithio rhan o'r cyfan cefnogi, ac mae'r cerdwyr wedi'i'r... Well, our application basically, our administration interface for users, this is what it looked like, it was one huge Rails app that was primarily like back-end rendered like a typical web application. And it worked pretty well and it met our current needs but it had gotten to the point where it had gotten into a bit of a mess and we'd sort of designed ourselves into a core and both in terms of the visual design and the user experience but also the design and the architecture of the code underneath it where adding new features had become incredibly, incredibly difficult. And we got to this point where we needed to add quite a large feature and we just couldn't see a way to do it without it taking months and months and months. So, instead of adding the feature, we just chucked it away and started again and built an Angular app to do the same job back by an API. So, before I dig into that, we've got in GoCardless, we have three types of user. We have a merchant who is the person who collects money. So, if you integrated your app with GoCardless, you'd be the merchant, a customer who pays merchant money. And then there's this third weird kind of user which we call a partner which is that there's this way that you can set up an API integration that manages merchants and customers at a sort of higher level. So, for example, we have an integration with FreshBooks, the online accounting people, and they will create merchants and set up the customer relationships and all that kind of thing. And each of these three different types of user have quite specific needs from their GoCardless dashboard and they want to see quite different things. And the reason that we kind of got into this mess with our dashboard being so difficult to change, we figured was that we tried to smush these three different users all into one interface. So, what we decided to do was focus just on merchants for a start because they're by far our biggest users. And we rebuilt just the merchant application as an Angular app backed by a fast Rails API that just talks JSON. And we really did have something up and running fairly quickly. It took us a little bit longer to flesh out all the functionality. But we were really pleased with how quickly we were able to build stuff and how easy it was to add new features. Not to mention the fact that the design in terms of visuals but also UX was much, much better and much more extensible as well, so that was nice. And on top of all that, it actually meets our merchant's needs better, so that was a bonus. So whilst we were building it, we started seeing all these patterns as we were building the application out. So, if we jump back to this first page, which is a list of your payments, there's a filters control, which controls what you see in this main table. You can filter it by date and that kind of thing. There's a little export button over in the corner which pops open a modal and lets you export CSVs of the data that you're showing in the table. A different page shows all of your customers, so you're a merchant you have customers set up. And again, we're able to filter the table, we're able to pop open a modal to export it. There's another control that lets you tab between different views and yet another modal to pop up yet another form. And just to drive the point home again on a page for plans, which are kind of this concept that wraps up a subscription, tabs, modals and so on. So Angular has this feature, one of its headline features is directives. And directives give you a nice way to wrap up self-contained bits of functionality. So you can take, you can imagine the markup that you might need to create a modal. It's like a link and then it's a div and the div contains all of the content for the modal and you need to write the JavaScript to show and hide the div and so on and so on. With Angular you can boil that down into one reusable component and just spit out a modal tag onto your page. And that kind of encapsulates all of the logic for creating a modal, which is really nice. If you've been following along with web components and how they're progressing, it's a really similar idea. You get to put this veneer over the top of all the messy complexity and just reuse it again and again. So in Angular directives you can back your directive with a template and with some JavaScript files that govern how that template behaves. So using this modal example, the template would look possibly something along these lines to begin with. So the link that Toggle was showing and hiding the modal and then the actual modal and the contents. Directives also let you pass data in. So in a similar way to how you might pass data into a function and then the function gets to operate on the data in its own isolated scope. You can pass data into a directive and then it's accessible from your JavaScript that backs the directive and also within your templates directly. So to take this example, we're passing in as an attribute on the HTML element, a link text piece of data with a value add customer. And then if we skip back over to the directive template you can render it out into the page with curly braces a lot like you do in handlebars. Angular's also got this cool feature called Transclusion which the way they describe it in the docs, it sounds really confusing and complicated. And I've heard Ember people, I think Tom Dale who I follow on Twitter, making fun of Angular through like Transclusion and all these obscure sounding terms. But it literally just means that you can put stuff inside your directive tag and then over in your template you get access to it. So what I've done here is taken the modal and completely emptied it out, added this ngTransclude attribute onto, you can add it to any element inside your template. And it effectively takes this and just spits it out inside the element that you have ngTransclude on. So what you end up with is being able to say I want a modal, I want the button to say add customer and I want the contents to be this. And you can just slap it on your page in a really like clean declarative way and not have to worry about the implementation once you've built it one time. Which is really cool and that's why Angular rocks and Ember sucks. Question? No. So yeah, I mentioned at the beginning I started playing with Ember a couple of months ago and one of the things that I, well I started playing with Ember and I started like following along with the Ember community and following some of the people who commits the core and that kind of thing. And one of the things that really struck me was how they all seemed really keen to, like they'll poke fun at other frameworks and that kind of thing, but they seemed keen to learn the good lessons from Angular or Backbone or whatever. And I was looking back through the Git history and it was about June Ember added Ember.component, which frankly is like exactly the same thing, it's just like a web component. And I mean it looks just like my Angular directed from before, the only difference being that instead of spitting out a HTML tag with angle brackets, you're spitting out a handlebar's helper with curly brackets. And it's really cool. You can do, yeah, you can do the exact same thing. And the template looks just like it ever did instead of having a like ng-transclude attribute, you just yield like you do I believe in Ember templates. And I've kind of been joking about how Ember sucks now, but I think the way that Ember approached this is I think they've looked at what Angular did with directives and directives are this like huge solution that lets you do less. Literally anything. The ng-transclude thing that I showed here, the ng-transclude thing that I've shown here, that's actually implemented as a directive as well. So you can have directives that are triggered from attributes, from elements, even from comments if you really wanted to. I don't know. But the thing that I want to say is I think Ember have taken all of that complexity and really bored it down to something that makes a lot more sense for like 80% to 90% of the use cases and just chopped away all of the other weird stuff that you kind of don't really need from the Angular solution. So we built our, back to our merchant dashboard, we built our merchant dashboard using these nice clean like composable chunks of UI.  Like you just kind of chunk this together. It was really, really neat and cool. But as I mentioned at the beginning, we'd only done it for merchant apps and we had this problem of like those pesky users who weren't merchants but also needed a dashboard. So coming back to it, we also need to build a dashboard for customers to look at so that they can see what payments they're making. We also need to build a dashboard for partners to look at so that they can see how many merchants they're signing up, what kind of payments they're putting through and so on. And thinking about the realisation that we had in the first place that our Rails app was a mess kind of because we were trying to serve all of these people in one big application, we decided that we were going to build a separate customer app and a separate partner app. So we were going to support three different Angular apps and they were all going to talk to the same JSON API but in terms of what you load in the client, completely separate. So this is what our customer app looks like. And you can see that it's pretty similar. Like we've got the same navigation along the top, we've got the same tables, we've got the same little drop down thing up here. And when we started copying and pasting our nice modular directives from app to app, we realised that this kind of, it sort of felt like it defeated the purpose of breaking stuff out in the first place. We've got these awesome separate apps that share components and then, like shit, we've got to copy and paste up everywhere. But happily, we didn't. So the way that we got around this problem was by every time that we needed to use a directive which we'd already defined in a different application, we'd pull it out into its own little repository along with the tests that go with it and like the HTML templates, the JavaScript, all that stuff, pull it out into its own little repository and then load it back into the application using Bower, which I guess people are familiar with. It's like a front end package management system from Twitter. So then we've got loads of little repositories on GitHub that just contain the core bits of code that we need to make a directive work. Once you've separated all that stuff out, so we separated it all out for the customer app and then when we came to build the partner app, the final separate application that we needed to build, it was a really, really quick process. It took, like, a couple of weeks and the reason for that was that we were writing this glue code which sort of gets some data and builds the skeleton of a page and then just drop all these directives on, bring them in with Bower, drop in on the directive onto the page and it became a really, really quick thing to do and if we needed to build something else, I'm confident that we could do it really quickly, which is really nice. The other benefit that we saw was that if we found a bug in, say, the filtering directive that filters the table view, you fix it in one place, which is the central repository, you write a test to isolate the problem and then you just go to all your clients and run Bower update filters and it sucks down all the new code, builds it up together, we're using Grunt as well to package everything back up together and it's sort of like, you know how it's really cool when you use NPM with Node and there's a bug fix and you just pull it down and forget about it, you can do the exact same thing with your front end UI components, which was a real revelation to us. So that's what we did and that's how we did it. There were a few issues that we ran into along the way. We ended up creating quite a lot of repositories to the point where we actually split out a separate organisation. Our GitHub organisation is called GoCardless and we split them off into GoCardlessNG and just to drive that point home, 46 repositories we have on there and particularly the merchant app requires most of them and each one does quite a small bit of functionality. So I think probably if we were going to kind of have a do-over, we might think about grouping related bits of functionality together into one package. So say like a whole load of functionalities that maybe is specific only to customers that you want to show in two different dashboards or something like that and kind of I think try and put like a few more things into different repositories. Something else that we didn't do but that I think would work really well is also including the styles for the components. We had HTML and JavaScript but I don't think there's really any reason why you shouldn't be able to include CSS files as well and just like run through and pull them out during your build step. And the last cool thing is that it's allowed us to put all of these UI components on to GitHub. So all of those 46 repos that I showed you a minute ago are all on GitHub, github.com slash gocardless-ng, all open source and all available to anyone who wants to use them, which I think is a really nice little bonus. And that's me. Questions? Yeah, so the question was when we started building the Angular app, did we use any bits of the old Rails app? And the answer is no, we chucked it away completely. Even to the point where we, I said we had a Rails API that backed the new app, that was a separate app as well. It was like clean slate, start again, do it properly. Yeah, because I mean, my experience in Angular was that the first time that I tried to use it, I wanted to add some charts in my little dashboard and that was incredible with Angular. But I didn't want to replace all the information and the handling that I had about the local page, which is just a single page. It's easily made with Rails app and then I was trying to like remember inside a subsection of Rails and those two pieces don't work well together. Yeah. Yeah, so we had something similar actually, our Rails app. One little section of it used backbone to just kind of like try and provide a little bit more structure, which also got quite confusing and quite difficult to manage, yeah. Sorry, could you rephrase that? Do you say how do we manage creating branches for the main application? Yes. So what we do is our application, the Angular application is deployed into a bucket on S3 and then we have Fastly, which is a CDN running on top of that. What we do is every time you deploy a version it gets put into a time-stamped, a new time-stamped bucket on S3 and then there's a ping to the Fastly API that says like stop looking at the previous bucket, start looking at this bucket. And so we've got on S3 like a time-slice version of all the applications. Does that answer the question? Yes. Like how do you pull the components into the apps when you're deploying? Okay, sure, sorry. So we just check the, we run our install, which pulls all the components down from GitHub and puts them into a components folder, which we then check into our repository. So the next developer coming to work on it doesn't have to run our install, it's just, it's all there in the repository, which we've found to work quite well. The next step is the bar. So, yeah, it'll be a brave deal in that one. I did think of my last survey question that is, how many of you have written Angular applications? Thanks, everyone. Thanks again to everyone.