Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives YouTube channel has a new dedicated playlist for the Science Media Group Collection, which features videos from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory program that was active from 1989 to 2013.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of