History and YouTube

Despite its growing riches, I imagine that YouTube still has limited historical uses. Here's an amusing one from Norway that"makes fun of modern newbie computer users by illustrating - in a way fully understandable to them - how silly some of their questions are by creating a similar problem 500 years ago." Here, then,"Introducing the Book":

Thanks to Jonathan Dresner and Dale Light at Light Seeking Light for the tip.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr illustrates another effective historical use for YouTube by putting it in significant historical context. Here, the context is one of the crucial turning points in civil rights movement's history. In the spring and summer of 1963, we lurched through emotional highs and abysmal low points. In April and May, Martin Luther King and others led the movement in Birmingham, Alabama, through its engagement in that citadel of racial segregation. We remember it primarily for his"Letter from the Birmingham City Jail." But it was followed by major confrontations in Cambridge, Maryland, Jackson, Mississippi, Greensboro, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Any one of them would be well remembered, if they were not overshadowed by Birmingham. In early June, Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson; and, in August, Fannie Lou Hamer and others were jailed and beaten in Winona, Mississippi. Later that month, 250,000 of us Marched on Washington to hear Martin Luther King preach his memorable"I Have a Dream" speech. It seemed like a euphoric end to a very cruel summer.

Two and a half weeks after the March on Washington, however, Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed on Sunday morning and the dead bodies of four little girls lay in its wreckage. I have some sense of how Martin Luther King felt, when he was asked to preach for their funeral. Exhausted and drained, he thought that he no longer had words for the occasion. It's at that point that he sent his personal attorney, Chauncey Eskridge, to find Vernon Johns in Petersburg, Virginia. King needed some fresh language from the old preacher and asked for his sermon notes.

C. Michael Bailey tells us how another artist from that period responded to the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church."... on November 18, 1963, John Coltrane stepped up to the microphone in fabled Englewood, NJ studio of one Rudy Van Gelder and over a McCoy Tyner Tremolo, blew his searing and definitive statement on the subject of the bombing -- ‘Alabama'."