Yale historian David Blight opens the second class of his DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies by asking why universities like Yale have begun formally studying their own ties to slavery. He frames the course around a blunt question borrowed from the 1930s fear of fascism: can it happen here, meaning can the systems of inequality slavery built, or the collapse of pluralistic democratic government itself, recur. Blight lays out how the course will move through Yale's own institutional history, the Civil War, and the political, constitutional, and commemorative legacies that followed, treating slavery not as a closed chapter but as a structuring force still shaping American law and public life. The lecture sets up the semester's argument rather than settling it, establishing memory and institutional self-examination as historical evidence in their own right.