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.

A Look at Slavery through Posters and Broadsides

Teaser

How to identify the author, audience, date, and message of historical posters.

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Description

Using historic posters, this lesson engages students in analyzing primary sources by identifying their author, intended audience, date, and message.

Article Body

This well-planned lesson, which uses posters on slavery and abolition, teaches students to ask important questions as they read a primary source. First, the teacher models the task by analyzing a representative poster in front of the classroom. In small groups, students then analyze additional posters, locating such information as author, audience, purpose, and message. They use this information to consider the attitudes towards slavery that the posters convey.

One strength of the lesson is that the primary sources are given in two formats: students receive historically evocative reproductions of the original posters along with easy-to-read typed transcriptions. Some teachers may choose to highlight important text, particularly for beginning readers; other teachers will want to leave it up to students to locate and identify this crucial information.

This lesson appears in the December 2004 issue of History Now, a quarterly journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Topic
Slavery and Abolition
Time Estimate
1 day
flexibility_scale
2
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship

Yes Lesson is accurate and up-to-date.

Rubric_Content_Historical_Background

No The lesson plan's Teacher Resources section includes links to information about historical context. It's up to teachers, however, to decide how much background students will need.

Rubric_Content_Read_Write

Yes In class, all students read, and one student per group records information on a Poster Inquiry Sheet. In the suggested homework assignment, students each write a news story about their assigned poster.

Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations

Yes The Poster Inquiry Sheet provides students with a method for identifying and interpreting historical facts.

Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing

Yes During the modeling and the group work, students learn and practice how to read primary sources.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate

Yes Some language in the posters may be difficult, but teachers can choose to highlight sections of text to reduce the amount or difficulty of necessary reading.

Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking

Yes The teacher's modeling step provides a helpful scaffold, as does the Poster Inquiry Sheet.

Rubric_Structure_Assessment

No Although the lesson plan does not include an assessment rubric, teachers can check in with small groups to assess student learning.

Rubric_Structure_Realistic

Yes The modeling provided in Steps One, Two, and Three is pedagogically useful. However, reading every single poster before the class may be excessively time-consuming. Teachers may want to discuss just one poster and then go around the classroom to check in with small groups as needed.

Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals

Yes The lesson plan helps students to learn about slavery and abolition while providing a method for analyzing primary sources.

National Register of Historic Places Travel Itineraries

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San Francisco during World War II, Mississippi's Indian Mounds, and Cumberland, Maryland, are just three of the more than 50 cities, towns, and rivers across the U.S. to which this website provides virtual access. In Baltimore, Maryland, a clickable map allows users to wander from the USCGC Taney (the last surviving warship present at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941) docked at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, to the house where Edgar Allen Poe lived in the mid-1830s, to the Union Square-Hollins Market Historic District to learn about Baltimore's oldest public market still in operation, and on to 40 more sites around the city. Each landmark is introduced with photographs, brief essays providing historical context, and tourist information.

Some travel itineraries are grouped by theme. For example, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement presents information on Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School, Virginia's Robert Moton High School, and the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Many of these sites includes links to lesson plans in NPS's Teaching With Historic Places. Updated regularly, this website is useful for teachers, students, and tourists alike.

Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection

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This is one of the richest collections of anti-slavery and Civil War materials in the world. Reverend Samuel J. May, an American abolitionist, donated his collection of anti-slavery materials to the Cornell Library in 1870. Following May's lead, other abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain contributed materials. The collection now consists of more than 10,000 pamphlets, leaflets, broadsides, local anti-slavery society newsletters, sermons, essays, and arguments for and against slavery. Materials date from 1704 to 1942 and cover slavery in the United States and the West Indies, the slave trade, and emancipation. More than 300,000 pages are available for full-text searching. Accompanying the documents are eight links to other collections.

African-American Experience in Ohio: From the Ohio Historical Society

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The collection includes more than 30,000 items relating to African American life in Ohio between 1850 and 1920, including personal papers, association records, a plantation account book, ex-slave narratives, legal records, pamphlets, and speeches. More than 15,000 articles from 11 Ohio newspapers and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, perhaps the oldest African American periodical, are included. Also provides more than 300 photographs of local community leaders, buildings, ex-slaves, and African American members of the military and police. Materials represent themes such as slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, African Americans in politics and government, and religion. Items include an extensive collection of correspondence by George A. Myers, an African American businessman and politician, as well as prominent political speeches.

Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860

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More than 100 published materials on legal aspects of slavery are available on this website. These include 8,700 pages of court decisions and arguments, reports, proceedings, journals, and a letter. Most of the pamphlets and books pertain to American cases in the 19th century. Additional documents address the slave trade, slave codes, the Fugitive Slave Law, and slave insurrections as well as presenting courtroom proceedings from famous trials such as the 18th-century Somerset v. Stewart case in England, the Amistad case, the Denmark Vesey conspiracy trial, and trials of noted abolitionists John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. A special presentation discusses the slave code in the District of Columbia. Searchable by keyword, subject, author, and title, this site is valuable for studying legal history, African American history, and 19th-century American history.

Dred Scott Case

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The Dred Scott case began in 1846 when slaves Dred and Harriet Scott sued for their freedom, basing their argument on the fact that they had lived in non-slave territories for a number of years. The case ended with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1857 that not only denied Scott both citizenship and the right to sue in federal court, but ruled that he never had been free and that Congress did not have the right to prohibit slavery in the territories. The decision sparked increased sectional tensions in the years leading to the Civil War. Facsimiles and transcriptions of 85 legal documents relating to the Dred Scott case are provided on this website. The site also provides a chronology and links to 301 Freedom Suits—legal petitions for freedom filed by or on behalf of slaves—in St. Louis courts from 1814 to 1860.

Slavery in New York

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Focusing on the experiences of Africans and African Americans in New York City, this collection presents nine galleries that explore various themes and time periods in the history of slavery. These include the Atlantic slave trade; slavery in Dutch New York; the growth of slavery in British Colonial New York; freedom for blacks during the Revolutionary War; the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799; free blacks in public life; Emancipation Day (July 4, 1827), and the history of scholarship on slavery in New York City. Each gallery has three panels: a gallery overview, a main thematic presentation, and one focusing on people, places, and documents. Of special interest are two interactive maps with timelines in the Dutch New York gallery and the Revolutionary War gallery; a picture gallery on the portrayal of blacks in New York City's public life; and profiles of nine African Americans who lived in New York City during the early republic.

Territorial Kansas Online

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These Territorial Kansas collections convey the growing divisions in Kansas and the nation over the expansion of slavery, federalism, nationalism, industrialization, and changing political coalitions in Congress. Materials include government documents, diaries, letters, photographs, maps, newspapers, rare secondary sources, historical artifacts, and images of historic sites. The website is divided into five sections: Territorial Politics and Government; Border Warfare; Immigration and Early Settlement; Personalities; and National Debate about Kansas. Each is searchable by keyword, author, and county. Topical sections are subdivided into relevant themes and include an introductory essay. Visitors will find essays on territorial politics, the rights of women and African Americans, military organizations, and free state and pro-slavery organizations. "Personalities" lists 32 individuals, including John Calhoun, and the final section presents both anti-slavery and pro-slavery perspectives of the national debate about Kansas. The site also includes a timeline with links and an annotated bibliography.

Tangled Roots

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These more than 200 documents explore cultural connections between the experiences of African Americans and Irish immigrants in America. Materials relate to individual leaders, historical events, economic, political, and social factors, and cultural achievements. A section entitled "Making Connections" offers 15 questions about historical events and people that represent the intertwined histories of Africans and Irish in America.

Other topics include the end of English participation in the slave trade, the emergence of the nativist Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s, and Ku Klux Klan activities against Catholics and blacks after the Civil War. A section on "Acceptance" explores perceptions of individual and group identities and four timelines focus on displacement, oppression, discrimination, and acceptance in America. "Voices" provides a sample of 13 public statements and interviews on ethnicity and race from ordinary modern Americans. The site also provides a bibliography; an essay by writer James McGowan, a black American with an Irish paternal grandfather; and links to related websites.