A cartoon from Harper's Weekly that criticizes African American politicians is rare. Josh Brown of the American Social History Project explains.
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Historian Carroll Gibbs discusses the foundation and early years of Georgetown (now part of Washington, D.C.), looking particularly at the role of African Americans in the community. He touches on the slave trade and also on the growth of African-American churches and religious communities in the city.
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Professor Gerald L. Early discusses cultural observations on Jackie Robinson, a staunch civil rights activist, successful businessman, and the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball. Early focuses on the significance of sports as a public arena and form of performance and on African-American perception of baseball.
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Ten teachers from the United States will join teachers from the United Kingdom and Ghana to study the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade under the direction of professors James Walvin and Stephanie Smallwood. The seminar will cover the history of African-European contact, the nature of African societies in the 15th to 18th centuries, the existing slave trading practices in Africa, the impact of the slave trade on regions of Africa, the character of the coastal trade in the forts and castles, the experience of the Middle Passage, and the numbers and experience of African arrivals in the Americas. Participants will be introduced to major scholarship as well as to the new online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. The Middle Passages seminar will focus on both historical content and classroom pedagogy, and will include visits to historical and cultural sites in Ghana. Participating teachers will be expected to develop collaborative teaching units with their international partners.
Thomas Jefferson is best known as the author of the American Declaration of Independence. Beginning with the imperial crisis that led to the separation and union of 13 British colonies in North America, this course will focus on Jefferson's political thought and career in order to gain a broad perspective on the founding of the United States and its early history. Professors Peter Onuf and Frank Cogliano will emphasize the geopolitical context of the revolutionaries' bold efforts to establish republican governments and federal union. Jefferson and his patriot colleagues were acutely aware of the world historical significance of their revolution and therefore profoundly anxious about its ultimate outcome and legacy. By exploring the rich canon of his writings participants will seek to understand better what the Revolution meant for Jefferson and Jefferson meant for the Revolution. Major themes will include federalism, foreign policy, constitutionalism and party politics, and race and slavery.
The ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States, formally, officially, and legally. A century and a half after Emancipation, however, the question of slavery still roils the waters of American life. This seminar, led by Ira Berlin, will view the development of chattel bondage in mainland North America from the perspective of the larger Atlantic world. Topics include the nature of the slave trade, the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, the evolution of plantation slavery, the transforming face of the Age of Revolutions, the remaking of slavery in the 19th century, and the contemporary debate about the meaning of slavery for American life.
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the provision of the Emancipation Proclamation which called for blacks to enlist in the Union army, and notes that it took years before their pay was comparable to whites.
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This Institute will explore segregated education in Virginia and trace the efforts of African Americans who fought for quality schools in the years before Brown v. Board of Education. It will examine Brown and both efforts to implement and resist the decision in Virginia. Finally, it will look at the legacy of Brown. Participants will interact with historians and educators and will take part in lectures, discussions, and workshops and go on field trips to Farmville and the state capitol. They will work with Virginia Historical Society staff to explore teaching strategies and the Society's resources.
This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and nonviolence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the Civil Rights Movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock Nine and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations.