This iCue Mini-Documentary looks at Booker T. Washington. Emancipated as a slave, he rose to become one of the most respected black educators at the head of the Tuskegee Institute; however, he was also accused of accommodating whites and accepting racism against blacks instead of fighting it.
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This seminar will focus on the factors that both pushed and pulled African Americans from the South after the Civil War. It will analyze the images of the North that prevailed among Southern blacks, the forces that shaped those images, and the prominent themes that the Great Migration brought to African American literature. How were the realities African Americans encountered in "the Promised Land" of the North comparable to experiences they had undergone in the South? What roles did individuals, agencies, family, and business play in the movement north? And how does an examination of westward migration and migration from rural to urban areas within the South broaden understandings of the Great Migration?
Led by distinguished scholars, each seminar will consist of three sessions. The first two, featuring lecture and discussion, will focus on the close analysis of images and primary documents. The third will concentrate on the integration of seminar ideas and material into lesson plans using the Center's Seminar-to-Classroom Guide.
From a National Museum of the American Indian email:
"Four hundred years ago, in 1609, Henry Hudson made his first voyage on the river that came to bear his name. To mark this historic event, Pace University commissioned Joseph Bruchac, a writer and educator of Abenaki descent, to create a play based on crew member Robert Juet's journal of the famous expedition. The play tells of the coming together of the European and Indian culture, in all of its complexities, and of the Indians' efforts to preserve and protect the river and their way of life.
Educators are invited to see a special presentation of the original play by noted author Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki) entitled The River of Tides. There will be a Q & A with Mr. Bruchac following the performance. Educators who pre-register will receive a companion curriculum."
For more on the National Museum of the American Indian, refer to NHEC's Museums and Historic Sites entry. Please note that this event takes place at the museum's New York City location.
Historian John Michael Vlach speculates very briefly on what slave quarters removed from the main estate at Hampton National Historic site may have looked like.
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This American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) Burials and Memorializations database features over 224,000 records of individuals buried or memorialized in ABMC cemeteries and memorials worldwide. Covering 24 cemeteries in 10 foreign countries and 3 additional memorials in the U.S., this database provides online access to burial information of those killed in action primarily during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
Additional individuals include veterans, active duty military, and civilians. The database also provides information on individuals in the Corozal American Cemetery (Panama) and the Mexico City National Cemetery (Mexico), including civilians and veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Civil War.
The database interface allows students to search by name, war or conflict, service or serial number, branch of service, unit, service entry location, cemetery/memorial, date of death, and keyword. Users can also search for service members who are missing in action and Medal of Honor recipients who are buried or memorialized by ABMC.
This organization of the material allows the user to explore a wealth of information. Students can research the geographic distribution of burials or explore representation among military branches in individual cemeteries. The ABMC database allows users to focus on who is buried and memorialized and to explore the experiences of individual soldiers as well as patterns and commonalities.
Students, for example, could begin to explore the number of women who served as nurses during World War I and the Influenza epidemic of 1918, or the experiences of the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army during World War II. Or they could chose to search for an individual from their home state or community and use the database’s information as a starting point to research the life of this individual. They can download search results and print, email, or share individual records.
This valuable research and teaching resource is accompanied by a robust “Education Resources” section featuring interactive timelines and campaign narratives, cemetery or memorial-specific mobile apps, publications, videos, lesson plans, and curriculum ideas. The “Flying Yanks: American Airmen in WWI” interactive, for example, provides historical background for students exploring the air war in WWI, a timeline and map with primary sources, as well as individual stories of airmen.
Students can use the database in conjunction with the learning materials to enrich their understanding of U.S. military history, memorialization, public history, and numerous other historical topics.
Textbooks often present a quick, uncomplicated overview of Reconstruction—a vast oversimplification of a time of social upheaval, tension, and violence. After Slavery: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas, a joint project of Queen's University Belfast, the University of Memphis, and the University of London, provides primary sources that take a closer look at the time period.
Focusing on the themes of labor, race, and citizenship, After Slavery presents sources from North and South Carolina as examples of trends nationwide. A 2,500-word Introduction explores Reconstruction and the rationale for choosing the Carolinas as the project's focus. About the Project explains the structure and rationale behind the website's learning units.
The Learning Units form the heart of the site. Ten units cover topics including emancipation, mobilization, land and labor, black soldiers, conservative reactions, justice, gender, poverty and white supremacy, coercion and resistance, and the Republican Party. Each unit includes a 400-word introduction and six or more primary documents with three to eight discussion questions each. Units can be viewed online or downloaded as PDFs. An introductory essay explains the mission behind creation of the units, and Recommended Reading lists more than 80 books, 50 articles, and 15 primary sources.
As of December 7, 2012, other materials on the site are still content-light. Interactive Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint only two events—the Hamburg Massacre and the Cainhoy Riot—with five to seven subevents included in each, as well as five-item lists of related sources.
Interactive Timelines includes three timelines with one-sentence descriptions on each item. Timelines look at general Reconstruction history as well as Reconstruction in North and South Carolina. Teacher Resources currently features links to more than 30 digital collections and exhibits, research tools, military records, audiovisual resources, and more. The section notes that lesson plans will be added in the future.
A valuable resource for teachers looking to complicate the textbook narrative on Reconstruction, and for teachers covering North or South Carolina history.
A project of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project preserves the history of the Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee, WI. In the late 1960s, the open housing movement worked to break down housing restrictions that segregated the city's population. Milwaukee residents of all ages and walks of life supported or opposed this movement.
The site features more than 150 digitized primary sources from the period, including oral histories, letters to organizations, support and hate letters, meeting minutes, Henry Maier's 1967 mayor's log, speeches, press releases, photographs, official reports and research studies, video clips, curriculum and programming from Freedom Schools (alternative schools children could attend during school boycotts), and more. Sources can be searched by keyword and browsed by media type (audio, documents, photos, or video) or collection (materials are divided into 10 collections by relationship to prominent individuals and groups in the movement). Visitors can add sources to "My Favorites" and review them as they browse.
In addition, a downloadable map shows the division of Milwaukee neighborhoods in 1967 and the path of the Aug. 28 open housing march, and a timeline tracks local and national events from 1954 to 1976. A glossary of key terms gives the context for more than 60 acronyms, names, places, and other terms, and a bibliography lists more than 40 primary sources and more than 50 secondary sources.
Teachers may need to do a little extra legwork to contextualize the primary sources, but the collection can bring Civil Rights Movement history home to Wisconsin students, particularly those in Milwaukee and the surrounding area. Teachers nationwide can use the materials to explore the work of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP Youth Council, and local institutions like Freedom Schools and integration committees.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) invites visitors to explore American identity through the lens of African American experiences. Its collections will focus on African American history and culture throughout the U.S., including U.S. connections to other cultures and nations.
The museum broke ground on February 22, 2012. Until the completion of the building, visitors can tour NMAAHC exhibits at the neighboring Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Exhibits have featured the lives of Thomas Jefferson's slaves, Harlem's Apollo Theater, DC black culture and the Scurlock Studio, African American portraits, and more.
Online resources are currently sparse, but expect to see them expand as the museum's collection grows and its physical presence opens to the public. Check out current and past exhibit listings for online versions. Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty includes essays and primary sources on enslaved life at Monticello, and For All the World to See looks at how visual culture (TV, magazines, and more) changed and reinforced images of African Americans and the Civil Rights Movement.
The museum blog updates regularly with reviews of books for children and adults, reflections on historical topics, and interviews on artifacts and exhibits. DC area educators can attend free professional development events and arrange for free in-school object-based, standards-aligned outreach for grades 46. (Educators outside of Washington, DC, can keep an eye open for online professional development opportunities such as this conference on teaching the Civil Rights Movement with Smithsonian collections.)
For a sense of the museum's focus on connecting past and present and preserving individual stories, see the museum's YouTube channel and StoryCorp initiative. Both share oral histories and personal stories from the past.
What pushes and pulls people into new ways of life? In this lesson, students use artifacts, documents, and photographs to help them answer this question.
The Henry Ford Museum’s "Early 20th Century Migration—Transportation: Past, Present and Future" is a thematically rich teaching unit. Through artifacts, documents and photographs, students explore the overarching question, What pushes and pulls people into new ways of life? How did the lure of jobs in U.S. factories “pull” Europeans and people of the American South to northern cities and new ways of living? The lessons are both rigorous and relevant, and continuously engage students in considering the impact of the past on the present.
Dubbed an Educator DigiKit, the unit includes extensive materials for teachers. The Teacher’s Guide includes timelines on various historic themes relevant to the lesson topics, a glossary, bibliographies, connections to Michigan and national standards, and field trip suggestions. The lesson plans introduce the assembly line concept, technological and economic forces that cause large-scale migration, fair labor issues, challenges faced by immigrants, and the ongoing changing nature of work up to the present. All of the lessons include links to primary sources in the Henry Ford Museum Online Collection and they utilize a range of activities, including simulations, math-based problem solving, and source analysis.
Teachers will want to consider supplementing this unit by incorporating a rigorous, systematic approach to analyzing primary sources. Borrowing one from another site (see possibilities here) could strengthen the individual lessons and unit. A rich resource, 20th Century Migration honors middle elementary children by challenging them to ponder and interpret significant topics in history that continue to affect their world today.
Yes
Not only are the details accurate, but the breadth of the perspectives in the lessons helps students develop an accurately complex sense of the unit topics.
Yes
Brief secondary sources provide context for the investigations. For examples, see an essay on the nature of assembly line work on page 44, or a PowerPoint on urbanization that is linked from pages 36 or 37.
Yes
Includes a few explicit writing exercises, primarily short-answer assessments. Class discussion questions might be used as writing prompts in older grade levels.
For an example, see writing prompts for primary source analysis on page 55.
Yes
Would have liked to see primary source analysis embedded earlier in the unit; it is not introduced until near the end of the unit. The unit would also be more powerful if it introduced a systematic model for source analysis.
No
The source analysis guides do not ask students to consider the author or creator of a source. The informal mini-biographies used as primary sources in Lesson 6 are intriguing; the lesson would help students better understand the nature of historical analysis if they engaged them in asking who created the biographies and why.
Yes
The lessons lend themselves to ready adaptation not only in grades 3-5, but for middle school as well.
Yes
Yes
Topical knowledge is emphasized in the unit. Nonetheless, the unit does include activities to engage children in interpreting historical documents for basic understanding. No criteria for assessment are included.
Yes
The learning goals are topical.
Yes
The learning goals are topical.
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In the struggle for women's suffrage, how did African American women represent themselves? What goals did they have and how did they work to reach those goals? Reading an article published in the August 1915 issue of the NAACP newsletter The Crisis, TJ Boisseau finds that activist Nannie Helen Burroughs used several arguments in favor of suffrage for African American women. Burroughs emphasized women's roles as social "housekeepers" and their differences from African American men.
I have an interesting document, actually, about why black women need the vote. Black women are also using a kind of argument from expediency after 1900. By "expediency" I mean pragmatism, practical reasons. They’re not only arguing from justice—that this is what is right—although they retain that as well.
And I think that Nannie H. Burroughs's article, that is short and something that students could easily read, makes a profound point. Nannie Burroughs, whose mother was an emancipated slave, was one of the founders of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention, which is a very important locale for the Southern black women's movement. She was a black women's club leader.
The clubs that women organized at the turn of the century are more than recreational and more than philanthropic even; and certainly for black women even when they're philanthropic, it's about uplifting the race. The National Association of Colored Women's motto becomes by the 1920s "Lifting as we Climb." And so there's an idea that anyone who achieves a certain level of middle-class respectability or economic stability in the black community has a responsibility to the entire black community. Women really took that message to heart and really saw their role change by 1900.
I would read this just to make sure that students take note of the particularities here. So this isn't a visual source, but it is a powerful textual source. It reads,
"When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written. Because the black man does not know the value of the ballot, and has bartered and sold his most valuable possession, it is no evidence that the Negro woman will do the same."
And here what she's referring to is the common practice—or at least not uncommon practice—of black men who otherwise would have been beaten and possibly killed for voting, pragmatically taking money in order to vote for the Democratic party, the party of the South, the party of the Confederacy for a long time. She's critical of black men for that. I think as historians and as contemporary people we need to put that in some context, she's using this as a point of contention in order to draw a very different picture for black women. But I wouldn't want students to take away her criticism of black men, without understanding the context for it.
She goes on to say, "The Negro woman, therefore, needs the ballot to get back, by the wise use of it, what the Negro man has lost by the misuse of it. She needs to ransom her race. She carries the burdens of the Church, and of the school and bears a great deal more than her economic share in the home."
In a very short space of time she has identified key tensions between black men and black women and between blacks and whites. One is that black men are not allowed to have the kinds of industrial jobs that would provide a wage that can support a family. Black women, therefore, typically need to work outside the home for a wage. Which is something that is inimical, is opposite to the idea of the middle-class woman who does not engage in wage earning, or really deals with money in any way.
So she makes that point, but she also says that the black woman carries the burden of the church and the school. So at the same time she talks about black women have sort of double duties that are unique to black women but common to women in general, which is serving the church, serving the community, making sure that schooling and other services for children are there.
What she is doing is similar to white suffragists, is taking a popular convention of the moment and twisting it to serve her purposes. To say that regardless of what you feel about putting the vote in the hands of black people, here's how it will serve your interests. She's speaking a racist language. She concludes by saying, "The ballot, wisely used, will bring to her," the Negro woman, "the respect and protection that she needs. It is her weapon of moral defense." She has made her point loud and clear and gotten the attention of both white and black readers who then might debate, at least, the argument that she has brought to the fore. And, thereby, she has accomplished her aim—by putting suffrage smack in the middle of race relations and not just gender relations.