The After Slavery Project, a transatlantic research collaboration directed from Queen's University Belfast, launched its Online Classroom, ­a set of 10 online units that explore the aftermath of emancipation in the Carolinas. Organized thematically, the teaching units cover a range of topics, richly illustrated with an array of primary source materials from dozens of archival collections.

The unit Freed Slaves Mobilize, for example, includes a background essay, transcriptions of nine primary source documents and illustrations, questions related to each document, and suggestions for further reading.

After Slavery addresses emancipation both as an attempt by African Americans to overcome the racial legacies that attended and outlived slavery and as a profoundly important chapter in the history of America's working people. One aspect of this story that has become clearer in recent years is the variety of experience among former slaves across the South. These variations make it necessary to move away from broad generalizations about 'the' African American experience after the Civil War and to try to uncover both the shared elements in black life across the region and the varying capacity of freedpeople to mobilize. This emphasis on the "multiple configurations of freedom" across the post-emancipation South provides the rationale for the project's focus on North and South Carolina: together these states reflect the productive, demographic, political, and geographic diversity of the region as a whole.

EDSITEment posts new materials this month from 19th-century historical writing to material culture to fiction. New resources include a feature on teaching Alexis de Tocqueville's Introduction to Democracy in America, and new lessons on Thomas Hart Benton's painting The Sources of Country Music, and Ernest Hemingway's short story Three Shots.

John Hope Franklin, African American historian, professor, and civil rights activist, passed away on March 25. His life work changed the way we explore, analyze, construct, and teach American history. "He not only studied history; he made it," explains an editorial in The Washington Post.

Franklin lived and acted with a conviction that historians have a voice and an obligation to the present and to the determination of public policy. "Using one's skills to influence public policy seemed to be a satisfactory middle ground between an ivory tower posture of isolation and disengagement and a posture of passionate advocacy that too often deserted the canons of scholarship," he said.

As an historian, he is credited as the first to contextualize African Americans in the historiography of American history with the 1947 publication of From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, a book he continuously revised and whose sales have exceeded 3 million copies throughout the world. As his obituary from Duke University states, "At the time From Slavery to Freedom was published, there were few scholars working in African-American history and the books that had been published were not highly regarded by academics. To write it, he first had to give himself a course in African-American history, then spend months struggling to complete the research in segregated libraries and archives—including Duke's, where he could not use the bathroom."

He published his last book, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, in 2005.

In the almost-60 intervening years, John Hope Franklin wrote history, taught history, and made history. The articles and multimedia links below highlight his life and hint at the depth of his influence.

News from the American Historical Association includes links to Franklin's work and online interviews.

Duke University Remembers John Hope Franklin is a website dedicated to accomplishments, quotes, statements, and images. The site (including the detailed obituary cited earlier) offers the opportunity to share condolences and memories. The Gallery includes filmed interviews with Franklin, courtesy of University of North Carolina TV.

Franklin was the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University where he founded the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies and whose Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library houses the John Hope Franklin Collection of African and African American Documentation.

The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, a part of the Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, has also posted biographical interviews with Franklin on his work as a historian, including Dr. Franklin on the Role of the Historian in the World.

Franklin is memorialized in a comprehensive biography in The New York Times.

He spoke with journalist Gwen Ifill about his autobiography and the state of race in America in 2005 during a PBS interview.

Under Historians in the News, the History News Network encourages readers to post their memories of John Hope Franklin, links to news articles and videos, and offers articles from the HNN archives by and about Franklin.

School's out (well, more or less—excluding professional development, workshops and conferences, and planning for next year), and more leisure time for reading may be in. Here is the first in a series of suggestions from staff at the National History Education Clearinghouse for your summertime "must read" booklist!

In 1931, nine African American boys rode with hobos on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis and along the way, two white women—fearful of arrest for prostitution—claimed the Scottsboro boys raped them. Local juries found them guilty, even after the U.S. Supreme Court twice struck down the verdict and one of the two women changed her story. Kelly Schrum, Clearinghouse Co-Director and Director of Educational Projects for the Center for History and New Media, recommends James Goodman's account of the narrative of the Scottsboro boys, Stories of Scottsboro. "It's an engaging read. Goodwin is a storyteller, and he weaves together multiple perspectives and threads—often conflicting and competing—to demonstrate how we make sense of experiences." Stories from Scottsboro explores layers of meaning through the perspectives of plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers, judges, journalists, NAACP workers, and the Communist-backed International Labor Defense and links those points of view to the larger historical framework of the 1930s.

Sharon Leon, Clearinghouse Co-Director and Director of Public Projects for the Center for History and New Media, recommends Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North by John T. McGreevy. According to Leon, "This book does a good job of paying attention to the role of place and theology in thinking about identity and race." Parish Boundaries explores the meaning of neighborhood to urban Catholics, a meaning in which geography, church, and school became inseparable. McGreevy explores how this sense of neighborhood influenced local Catholic resistance to integration—even when the Catholic church itself espoused racial equality.

The Ballad of John Henry is perhaps the most recorded song in America—the story of the iconic railroad man who became a mythical embodiment of the heroism of the American worker. Lee Ann Ghajar, Clearinghouse Project Manager, likes Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend because it is as much a book about how to do history as it is an historical narrative. The reader travels with historian Scott Reynolds Nelson and his dog in his wife's Ford Escort in pursuit of the real John Henry—a man more likely a mistreated, rather short, convict-laborer than the gigantic hero of folk songs who died with a hammer in his hand after a mighty race against a steam drill. "You follow the historian as he follows John Henry from the early days of his research when an historic map saved Scott Reynolds Nelson from a speeding ticket into archives, libraries, census documents, and company reports. It's a great story," Ghajar explains.

Teresa DeFlitch, Clearinghouse Project Manager, appreciates The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities by Richard Bushman. Bushman looks at the material culture of everyday life—houses and their rooms, clothing, conversation, books, manners, entertainment and posture, for example—and discusses how changes over time illustrated changing values and the development of the American middle class. DeFlitch says The Refinement of America "vividly demonstrates the importance of material culture and landscape in history and how we use things to create identity." Bushman uses different kinds of evidence, from teacups to churches to etiquette books, to demonstrate how the refining process affected the way Americans interacted with each other. "Students can relate to the agency of consumers, even if they are from long gone centuries, and there is plenty of opportunity to use the book as a framework for teaching behavioral differences between then and now," DeFlitch concludes.