At Monument Hill, a crypt and granite monument honor the men who died in the 1840s Dawson Massacre and Black Bean Death Lottery. The nearby Kreische House and Brewery preserve the life and work of Heinrich L. Kreische and other early European immigrants who settled the area.
The sites offer tours.
"Elkhart's National New York Central RR Museum recaptures the days when locomotives were symbols of progress, and ambassadors of goodwill across the country. The Museum was founded in 1987 and is an ever growing preserver of both local and national railroad heritage."
Last president of the Republic of Texas Anson Jones farmed near Washington during and after his presidency. Jones named his farm "Barrington" after his Massachusetts home, Great Barrington. There he lived with wife Mary, their four children, his sister, sister-in-law, and five slaves. The family home, two slave cabins, a kitchen building, smokehouse, cotton house, and barn made up Barrington Farm. With Jones's daybook as their guide, the interpreters at Barrington Living History Farm conduct themselves much as did the earliest residents of the original farmstead. The Jones home is original; the outbuildings are replicas constructed by Texas Parks and Wildlife using Jones's own journal and drawings. Visitors to the farm can experience the sights, smells, and sounds of the 19th century. The scene is complete with heritage breeds of livestock. Interpreters, dressed in period style clothing, help visitors better understand what life was like 150 years ago. Visitors can participate in the work of the farm and become a part of the exhibit.
The farm offers demonstrations, tours, classes, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events (including living history events).
Note: Unpublished; converted to Examples of Historical Thinking entry
Scholars in Action presents case studies that demonstrate how scholars interpret different kinds of historical evidence. These two speeches, one by Sojourner Truth (1852) and one by Frances Watkins Harper (1857) reveal the ways that African American women presented their cause and themselves. For many reform-minded men and women in the 19th century, the movement to abolish slavery was the most important cause in American society.
Radical abolitionists who sought to create a democratic and egalitarian movement allowed women and African Americans to have unprecedented influence and public roles. Some women within the abolitionist movement noted the links between the plight of slaves and the plight of women and thus became active in some of the first women's rights organizations. Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree) was enslaved for 30 years prior to the abolition of slavery in New York. Once free, she was guided by spiritual revelation to change her name and become a preacher and an active abolitionist. Born to free blacks in Maryland, Frances Watkins Harper was a poet and a teacher who became active in the abolitionist struggle in the 1850s.
In this lecture from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, "historians James and Lois Horton cover 200 years of African American history from the colonial slave trade through the American Revolution to, finally, the Civil War."
What made Frederick Douglass a radical abolitionist?
That Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist is beyond debate. Born a slave, he eventually escaped and became one of the most famous activists to work for emancipation. Whether working as a stump speaker or editing one abolitionist newspaper after another, Douglass expressed tremendous hope that the slave power would eventually fall. He once declared, “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.” That Douglass was radical in his anti-slavery speeches and newspaper editorials is somewhat debatable, and would depend on how one defines “radical.”
“Hereditary bondmen! Know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”
Frederick Douglass was fond of quoting this line from Lord Byron as it summed up his political activism. This call to the enslaved to be their own liberators reflected a revolutionary urgency and fervor most would associate with radical measures. But compared with abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass’s one-time mentor and fiery editor of the Liberator (whose masthead read “No Union with Slaveholders”), Frederick Douglass appears measured and sensible. For example, Douglass once wrote, “My position now is one of reform, not revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the government—not over its ruins.”
In contrast, Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in public, calling it “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy [sic] ever exhibited on earth.” Most famously, he pronounced the Constitution “a covenant with death,” “an agreement with hell,” and “refuge of lies.”
Even more extreme was John Brown, who tried to recruit Douglass for a raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, VA, a doomed venture that exacerbated sectional tensions leading up to the 1860 presidential election. Brown believed the seizure of the armory would spur local slaves to rise up against their masters and spark a slave rebellion throughout the South. Douglass shunned the effort. As historian David Blight observed, “For Douglass, the question of violence was always more a tactical than a moral problem. He did not relish the prospect, but morally he believed the slaves had the right to rise up and slay their masters.” Compared with the lawlessness of Garrison and Brown and their disrespect for the Constitution, Douglass’s abolitionism looks less radical, if not tame.
Douglass sought to free the slaves within the confines of the Constitution. He thought only by keeping the slave states within the American Union could the federal government then be used to rid the nation of slavery. Douglass came to view the Constitution as a pro-liberty document, thus agreeing with Lincoln “the Great Emancipator” on the principal means of promoting freedom.
Lincoln understood the Founders to expect slavery to wither away in a generation or two by restricting its importation into the new nation (as early as 1808) and preventing its expansion into federal territory (see, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787). As historian James Oakes writes: “Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass agreed that there was no such thing as a constitutional right to own slaves. But for Lincoln the Constitution recognized the existence of slavery as a practical necessity, whereas for Douglass the absence of a right to own slaves obliged the federal government to overthrow slavery everywhere.”
In sum, what made Frederick Douglass an abolitionist was his experience with slavery firsthand: simply stated, he found it a poor fit for his humanity. He became a radical abolitionist, calling for the immediate abolition of slavery, because he came to view the U.S. Constitution as a pro-liberty document that could be interpreted to permit Congress to abolish slavery not only from federal territories but also in the states where it already existed. One might say his aims were radical, while his means, especially after the break from Garrison, were not radical insofar as they remained within the American constitutional context.
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. 5 vols. Edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers, 1950-1975.
_______. Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Library of America, 1994.
Myers, Peter C. Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute:
Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of the American West and the American Indian at the University of Arkansas, describes how guns and horses changed Native American culture, while European diseases ravaged the indigenous people of the New World who had no inherent immunity to them.
A quarterly journal inaugurated in September 2004 designed to "promote the study of American history" with articles by historians and teaching resources. Past issues on elections, primary sources on slavery, immigration, and American national holidays are also available on the site.
Each issue has six main features. "In This Issue" provides an introduction and overview. "The Historian's Perspective" offers four to six scholarly essays by noted historians on the issue's topic. "From the Teacher's Desk" has lesson plans for high school, middle school, and elementary school levels with links to related websites. "Interactive History" provides either timelines, quizzes, or interactive maps. The "Digital Drop Box" allows site visitors to post comments, suggestions, sample lesson plans, or stories from the classroom. "Ask the Archivist" has suggested sources and a section for questions and answers.
Offers hundreds of lesson plans composed by teachers, on a variety of subjects, organized into three groups—K-5, 6-8, and 9-12. Provides 31 plans for grades 9-12 on U.S. history topics, including civil rights, balancing budgets, jazz, opposing views of the Vietnam War, Native American history, the Cold War, Japanese-Americans during World War II, racism, NATO, the Salem Witch Trials, U.S.-Cuba relations, and "The Power of Fiction," focusing on socially-relevant texts. Also includes 33 Literature plans—many on works by American authors—and plans for world history and ancient history. Valuable for high-school level history teachers.
Introduces the National Women's History Project, "a non-profit organization dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the diverse and historic accomplishments of women by providing information as well as educational material and programs." Includes a 5,000-word essay on the history of the women's rights movement and a 7,000-word timeline. The site gives detailed information about the organization's activities, including efforts to bring women's history into public life, a list of curricular ideas for teachers, material concerning National Women's History Month, and a 15-question quiz on Women's History.
Perhaps most valuable, the site furnishes approximately 200 partially annotated links, arranged into 12 broad categories such as "Politics," "World History," and "Math and Science." Though lacking in primary source material, this site provides useful beginning resources for the study and practice of women's history.