Historian Simon Schama uses the 2007 bicentenary of Britain's abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to compare how Britain and the United States each reckoned with that history, drawing on his book "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution." Speaking to a full audience at Stanford, he lays out the story behind that book: enslaved Americans who ran to British lines during the Revolutionary War on the promise of freedom, and what happened to them and their descendants afterward as Britain and the new United States moved toward abolition on very different timelines and for very different reasons. Schama, known for BBC series like "A History of Britain" and "Power of Art," argues that the two nations built almost opposite founding myths around slavery and liberty, and he traces how those myths still shape each country's memory of the era. The talk stays close to the archival cases in his book rather than offering a general survey of abolition.