- Hi my name is Matthew Pinsker, I'm a historian. And here are a few things you need to know to sound smart about Bleeding Kansas. The term Bleeding Kansas was popularized in the 1850s by newspapers, like Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune.

It referred to the violence that erupted in the Kansas territory in the middle of the decade. That violence was an outbreak of conflict that had emerged from the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Which had organized the territories in the former Louisiana Purchase, under the principle of popular sovereignty. The idea that people could decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery.

The problem was, that the doctrine of popular sovereignty didn't tell you when they could decide for themselves. So, in order to decide the fate of the outcome of any referendum, forces who had an interest in the slavery issue began to rush to settle the territory. And they argued over who would govern this territory.

And there was a government set up that was pro-slavery in the Lecompton, and an anti-slavery alternative government that was set up in Topeka. Republicans in Washington backed the anti-slavery forces, Democrats in Washington typically backed a pro-slavery forces.

It was a standoff, and the standoff escalated into violence. Men like John Brown emerged. He was an abolitionist who had been living in Ohio, who followed his sons out to the territory, and fought a kind of war with the pro-slavery forces. John Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery settlers.

There was violence that erupted around the territory of Kansas in places like Washington D.C. A Senator from Massachusetts, named Charles Sumner, was nearly caned to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate by a Congressman from South Carolina, in the spring of 1856. Ultimately, somewhere between dozens and hundreds of people were killed in the Kansas territory during this two year period of sporadic violence. And ultimately, Kansas entered the Union after a long period of political standoff on the eve of the Civil War as a free state.

- Young people in large numbers came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards. These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases even murder political enemies of Mao in the Communist Party.