African American History Month 2011

Date Published
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Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
Photo, Navy baseball team--Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, Sept. 1944, NARA
Article Body

It's February! Resources throughout the web stand ready to provide you with lessons and primary source materials for Black History Month (also known as African American History Month), but African American history stretches far beyond the confines of one month and the narrative litany of a handful of cultural heroes. Maybe you want to go beyond Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Jackie Robinson. What stories can you uncover beyond the headlining stories textbooks provide? Remind your students of the complexity of African American history with these resources.

Documenting African American History
  • The New York Times' lesson plan "Stories to Tell: Curating an African-American History Exhibit" introduces students to the difficulties in curating a large museum—or even just one exhibit. How can curators for the developing Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture create a museum that honors all of African American history?
  • Search the Carnegie Museum of Art's Teenie Harris Archive Project for photographs taken by photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris for the Pittsburgh Courier. Published from 1907 to 1965, the Courier was a major African American newspaper, and these photographs show Harris's journalistic perspective on Pittsburgh events of all scales. Use the keywords "Teenie Harris," along with others related to your topic of interest, to find images of life at school, home, community events, church, work, and out on the town.
  • The Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Portraits of a City provides a similar photographic record of a place. The Scurlocks ran studios in DC for much of the 20th century, documenting African American life in the nation's capital.
  • The Library of Congress's American Memory collection The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 focuses on the themes of slavery, politics, and religion. Its wide range of primary-source documents, including thousands of newspaper articles, can help students construct a view of just what the collection's title implies.
  • High-quality photographs in the National Archives and Records Administration's "Pictures of African Americans During World War II" could give students a look into another kind of community—one that formed both overseas and on the home front during war.
Looking for More Suggestions?

If none of these resources fit into your curriculum or spark your interests, there's plenty where they came from. Search our Website Reviews using the topic "African Americans," and you'll turn up close to 300 websites, on topics ranging from Marcus Garvey to the construction of race to Seattle's Black Panthers to sheet music by and about African Americans. Or test your African American history knowledge in our weekly quiz feature! You and your students can take online quizzes on African American baseball players and other athletes, the historical accuracy of the film Glory, Jim Crow laws, and foodways.

You can also explore the African American History Month pages of history and educational organizations, including:

Quilt Index

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Cotton, Spiderweb, Scrap, 1901-1929, Connecticut Quilt Search, Quilt Index
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The Quilt Index gathers together images of quilts from historical societies and other institutions, as well as individual quilters, and information on both quilts themselves and the culture and skills of quilting.

The site search lets you specify details including the contributing institution, state and time period in which the piece was made, dominant colors, cultural or ethnic provenance of a quilt, or fabric type. The wide variety of options can make an initial glance at the search page intimidating, but it effectively allows a user to browse the collection according to his or her interests. Quilters may be more interested in pattern or fabric type, whereas history educators may wish to find local quilts from time periods past.

Additional subpages under the "Search" tab offer access to a number of quilting journals from the '70s through '90s, a means of searching ephemera (sketches, swatch collections, and more), and a lesson plan search feature. Searching for history lesson plans results in four hits as of January 30th, 2012 (Appalachian culture, interviewing a quilter, reading a quilt as a historical document, and quilt symbolism). Note that this, rather than the "Lesson Plans" tab, is the easiest way to reach lesson plans intended to be used in history curriculum.

Also worth exploring are essays and galleries. The latter consists of collections of quilts arranged by themes. Example themes include quilts and human rights, Texan quilts, and Amish quilts. In contrast, essays is text heavy. Here, site visitors can find text commentary on cultural significance, historical quilting, or regional or historical quilt characteristics, for example, as well as quilt-related poetry.

Prairie State Park [MO]

Description

Visitors to the park can experience a walk through prairie grasses that tower above their heads with a chance to view bison and elk. Tallgrass prairie once covered more than a third of Missouri’s landscape. Today less than one percent remains. Prairie State Park, at nearly 4,000 acres, preserves Missouri's largest remaining tallgrass prairie. The park's visitor center is designed to enhance the visitor's "prairie" experience with nature programs, interpretive displays, and hands-on exhibits.

The park offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.

Montauk State Park [MO]

Description

Early settlers first established Montauk as a self-sufficient community in the early 1800s. A gristmill, built in 1896, is open seasonally for tours. This historic site was a vital part of the Montauk Community into the 1920s. The "Old Mill" had elaborate milling machinery. Much of it is still located there.

The park offers tours and occasional educational and recreational events.

Lake of the Ozarks State Park [MO] Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/25/2008 - 14:53
Description

Vistors can enjoy the solitude of an undeveloped cove, hidden along the shorelines of one of Missouri's largest lakes, Lake of the Ozarks. The 17,626-acre Lake of the Ozarks State Park offers this opportunity, along with a variety of recreational activities on the lake or on shore. The region lies near the middle Osage River, which was a vital resource to Native Americans, fur traders, and early homesteaders of central and western Missouri throughout the 17th to early 20th centuries; later in history, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) worked to build many of the foundation structures that still give the park its character today.

The site offers educational programs.

Gen. John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site [MO]

Description

One of America's highest ranked military officers, Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, spent most of his childhood years in the small town of Laclede. Pershing was born Sept. 13, 1860, and moved into the Gothic nine-room house in Laclede with his family at age six. He taught at Prairie Mound School, and in 1886, graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, thus beginning his military career. Between 1886 and his military retirement in 1924, Pershing fought his way up through the military ranks. In 1917, Pershing was sent to France as Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and two years later was named General of the Armies of the United States by a special act of Congress. Today, visitors can tour Gen. Pershing's boyhood home. A statue of "Black Jack" stands next to the home surrounded by granite tablets naming war veterans. Inside Prairie Mound School, an exhibit gallery allows visitors to walk through the many doorways Gen. Pershing passed through during his childhood life, military career, and numerous accomplishments.

The site offers a short film, exhibits, and tours.

Zoar Village State Memorial [OH]

Description

Founded by the German religious dissenters called the Society of Separatists of Zoar in 1817 as a communal society, Zoar today is an island of Old-World charm in east-central Ohio. Many of the German-style structures built by the Zoarites have been restored and are open to the public as Zoar Village State Memorial. Others are privately-owned, and serve as residences, shops, restaurants, and bed and breakfast inns. Visitors can experience the life of the agrarian Separatists by visiting the ten restored buildings (Number One House, Kitchen/Magazine Complex, Bimeler Museum, Garden House, Bakery, Tinshop, Dairy, Wagon Shop, Blacksmith Shop and Zoar Store), which are staffed with costumed interpreters and furnished with items made or used by the Separatists. Some buildings are staffed, others open by guided tour. Volunteers give craft demonstrations during the many yearly special events.

A second website, for the Zoar Community Association, can be found here.

The site offers exhibits, tours, demonstrations, classes and other educational programs, and recreational and educational events.

Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor [OH]

Description

The Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor provides a dramatic overview of the impact of the iron and steel industry on Youngstown and other Mahoning Valley communities. The building, designed by renowned architect Michael Graves in 1986, houses the museum's permanent exhibit, "By the Sweat of Their Brow: Forging the Steel Valley," which explores labor, immigration, and urban history, using videos, artifacts, photographs, and reconstructed scenes. Objects on display range from workers' tools and clothing to "last heats," the last batches of steel produced at each of the mills before they closed. Hundreds of photographs, some more than 30 feet long, are used throughout the museum. Videos examine topics such as housing, recreation, and urban history. Life-size scenes—including a mill's locker room, part of a company-built house, and a blooming mill, where steel ingots were shaped for further processing—help visitors understand steelmaking and the lives of steelworkers.

The center offers exhibits, tours, research library access, and educational programs.

McCook House [OH]

Description

This large brick house is a memorial to the "Fighting McCooks," a nickname given to the family because of their military service during the Civil War. Daniel McCook built this home and his family lived here until 1853. During the Civil War, Daniel's family contributed nine soldiers to the Union cause including 5 generals. Brother John's family contributed 5 officers. Four of Daniel's family including Daniel himself died in the conflict. The restored house has several period rooms and a large room of exhibits on the McCook family and the Civil War.

The house offers exhibits and tours.