The Internet African-American History Challenge

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Features illustrated biographical sketches, each approximately 400 words in length, of 12 notable 19th-century African Americans—Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Tubman, Henry McNeal Turner, John Mercer Langston, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Ann Shadd, Nat Turner, Richard Allen, and Sojourner Truth.

Includes three interactive quizzes, based on information contained in the biographies, divided into three levels of difficulty.

Also provides guidelines for classroom use, including directions for setting up an "online grade book." The site's creators plan to add sketches and quizzes on notable 20th-century African Americans.

This user-friendly site is a useful tool for introducing African American history to young students.

Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices

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An exhibit of primary source material relating to slavery from the late 18th century to emancipation in the 19th century.

It reproduces or describes 33 documents, such as a broadside announcing a reward for the return of a runaway slave, a map delineating slave labor on an indigo plantation, a New York bill of sale for the purchase of a slave in 1785, and an 85-page memoir written in 1923 by Elizabeth Johnson Harris, an African American woman from Georgia who relates stories and experiences of her parents and grandparents, who had been slaves. The site "showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute."

Say it Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches

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This small website assembles transcripts and audio recordings of 12 important speeches by prominent African Americans of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. These include: Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Dick Gregory, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Jr., Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Jesse Jackson, Clarence Thomas, and Barack Obama.

Topics include Washington's speech to the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, Bethune's 1939 speech "What Does Democracy Mean to Me?," a 1966 speech by Carmichael at U.C. Berkeley, and King's 1968 "I've Been to the Mountaintop" sermon delivered in Memphis just before his assassination. The speech by Marcus Garvey is his only known recording. Each speech is accompanied by a brief introduction. The site provides 40 links to related websites.

Harlem History

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This website offers a collection of oral history interviews, images, videos, and scholarship on various aspects of the history of Harlem. It is divided into three main sections. "Arts and Culture" has six exhibits that include two video interviews focusing on Harlem's artists, writers, and musicians; oral history interviews with A. Phillip Randolph on the Harlem Renaissance and Dorothy Height on Harlem's theatrical scene; and a multimedia presentation on the Harlem Renaissance. "The Neighborhood" provides seven exhibits that include an oral-history interview with the first African American patrolman in New York City, an essay and video on the architecture and development of Harlem, an e-seminar about classic New York ethnic neighborhoods, an essay on the decline of Jewish Harlem, Bayard Rustin's reflections on different ethnic groups with economic interests in Harlem, and civil rights leader Dorothy Height's description of changes in Harlem and her attachment to the neighborhood. "Politics" offers four exhibits: oral history interviews with A. Phillip Randolph on Marcus Garvey's movement in Harlem and Bayard Rustin on Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a video lecture on Harlem politicians, and a video interview with David Dinkens on 1950s Harlem. The site also offers a short (eight images) photo essay entitled "The Streets of Harlem" and a multimedia presentation on the 1945 Negro Freedom Rally. This site offers a useful and varied collection of material for those researching or teaching Harlem or 20th-century African American history.

Jacob Lawrence: Over the Line

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Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) examined the African American experience through art. This website was created in 2001 to accompany an exhibition exploring his life and work. The website (with a flash version and an html version) provides a straightforward account of Lawrence's life and work accompanied by images.

The site is presented in three parts, "Beginnings," "The Young Artist," and "Over the Line," each organized as a sequence of pages consisting of short descriptions (50 words) and associated images. There are two short audio clips of Lawrence talking about Harlem and color. The images are relatively small and cannot be enlarged.

Northern Visions of Race, Region, and Reform in the Press

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This website brings together more than 200 letters, articles, official documents, and illustrations focused on issues of race and reform during and after the Civil War, including unpublished letters written by Northern women who taught freedmen in the South and letters written by their students. Many of the texts are presented in original (handwritten) format and transcription. The website is a combination exhibit, with introductory and explanatory text, and primary source archive.

Materials are available through two paths-through the "Primary Resource Index" or through three topics: "The Freedmen," "Freedmen's Education," and "At War's End" (not yet complete). Within each topic, there are four to seven subtopics, such as "The Emancipation Proclamation" and "Visions of Freedmen in Letters of Freedmen" and at least one subtopic has further subcategories. Each subtopic begins with introductory text, often several paragraphs in length, that provides background information as well as links to relevant documents. The site cautions that "some of the materials on this site are racially offensive." A search is available at the bottom of document pages, but the dedicated search page is not currently working. There are links to more than 100 additional online primary and secondary sources.

The African-American Mosaic

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Comprised of 15 essays, ranging from 700 to 1,800 words, and about 120 images, this exhibit is drawn from the black history and culture collections of the Library of Congress. The materials cover four areas: colonization, abolition, migrations, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA)--a New Deal program of the 1930s. Specific subjects include Liberia and the American Colonization Society; prominent abolitionists; Western migration, homesteading, and Chicago as the "promised land" for Southern blacks; and ex-slave narratives gathered by WPA writers. No primary texts are available here, but the essays are well-illustrated with historical photos and images.

Lionel Hampton: His Life and Legacy

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A tribute to jazz great Lionel Hampton, this site explains the long friendship between a university and a musician (after whom the University of Idaho named the Lionel Hampton School of Music). The site includes a 1,000-word biography of Hampton, as well as a timeline of his relationship to the school. Also included are a gallery of 23 photographs and a collection of nine videos of Hampton performing and conducting teaching sessions. A PDF version of Hampton's discography rounds out the collection.

Civilian Conservation Corps

Teaser

Examine the role of African Americans in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.

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Description

Students engage in a sophisticated exploration of the African American experience with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression.

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The strength of this 2–4 day lesson is that it presents students with primary source documents representing multiple perspectives. These documents can help build students' understanding of the issues surrounding African American employment in the CCC. The documents also provide an excellent platform for students to explore the sticky political and civil rights issues facing the Roosevelt administration as it attempted to hold together a precarious political coalition that included both large numbers of African Americans and conservative Southern Democrats opposed to civil rights reforms. The lesson is comprised of four activities. Each activity is well structured and provides detailed procedures for classroom teachers. Teachers will use class discussions to assess student learning. The lesson closes with a solid writing prompt that encourages students to use documentary evidence to construct a historical argument. The lesson plan does not, however, provide resources for teachers to help students construct a high-quality historical essay. We suspect that teachers may need to provide guidance and assistance for writing the essay beyond that which is described in the lesson.

Topic
Civilian Conservation Corps; New Deal, Civil Rights
Time Estimate
2-4 Days
flexibility_scale
4
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes Historical background is detailed and accurate. Most documents are from the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

Yes Lesson includes a brief overview for students.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes Lesson centers on reading and interpreting documents. It ends with a writing assignment that requires students to use textual evidence to support their answers.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes Students use evidence from primary documents to build understanding of the African American Experience in the CCC and its political and social ramifications.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes Guiding questions require close reading of both source and perspective.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes Appropriate for 9–12 U.S. history classrooms. Could be adapted for higher-level middle school classrooms.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes Activities 1, 2, and 3 include excellent guided questions for use in class discussion or small group exploration. Activity 3 provides strategies to help students analyze a primary document.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No Assessment is conducted primarily through class discussion. However, a final essay question encourages students to use historical evidence. No evaluation criteria are included.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes Activities are clear and explicit. Of course, teachers may need to adapt the lesson to meet student needs. Lesson presents teachers with the option to use electronic tools to help manage documents and student work if they set up a free user account.

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes The four activities are well structured and the activities progress logically.

Exploring Historical Texts in a Discussion-Based Class

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Learning from Others: Learning in a Social Context from Annenberg Media is a video made up of two sections, the second half of which documents the practice of Avram Barlowe, a high school history teacher at the Urban Academy in New York City. (Go to Session 7 and view video from 13:58–25:55.) This video provides examples of two promising practices:

  • Helping students use textual evidence to support their claims
  • Leading a productive discussion in the history classroom by asking open-ended questions and restating student answers
Black Codes

The subject for the class discussion is a set of discriminatory Southern laws known as Black Codes. The laws were passed by Southern state legislatures in the wake of the Civil War and reflected the efforts of former Confederates to reassert control over the recently emancipated black population.

Returning Students to the Text

The classroom discussion is grounded in primary sources. Students are asked to look at examples of Black Codes and answer the following questions:

  • What were the laws designed to do?
  • How might such laws be defended by the people who wrote them?

Having asked students to form interpretations based on these texts, the instructor is diligent about reminding students to return to the texts during their discussion. "Let's look at what the law says," he instructs at one point, reinforcing his desire that they work with the evidence to develop their ideas.

Leading Discussion

A major part of managing a successful class discussion, this video makes clear, is asking open-ended questions that students can answer in a variety of ways. This approach makes the class discussion more accessible for all students and can engage them in using evidence to support their claims. The instructor in this classroom also works to put students in conversation with each other. He does this by restating and clarifying the claims made by students, as well as by pointing out areas of agreement and disagreement in their comments.

What's Notable?

Discussions are a common feature in many history classrooms. What makes this class unique, though, is the approach taken by the instructor. First, the video documents the practice of consistently returning students to the text in discussions, asking them to use evidence to support their claims. Second, it reveals a successful approach to promoting deeper historical understanding by asking open-ended questions and restating student answers.