Jonathan Holloway opens his Yale course on African American history from emancipation to the present with a framing lecture on method and stakes. He argues that the African American experience is a lens for understanding American history broadly, since it bears directly on what citizenship and freedom have actually meant in practice. He walks through Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech to abolitionist allies, the story of a former slave named John Jack and the epitaph on his gravestone, and Confederate scrip as evidence of how freedom and citizenship were linked and denied. The lecture closes by outlining the semester's throughline: post-emancipation Black history as a record of political struggle, social protest, state control, and cultural celebration, with symbols still active in politics and culture today. It is the first session of Yale's AFAM 162 and sets up the course's structure and reading list.