Join the staff at the world famous Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to experience the works of renowned African-American artist Jacob Lawrence. For more than 65 years, Jacob Lawrence was both an impassioned observer and storyteller who explored the diverse aspects of the African-American experience.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, after the Civil War, some southern blacks left farms for new jobs in factories, but quickly realized that working conditions were poor and the pay was worse.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, even though slavery is abolished after the Civil War, the system of share-cropping quickly emerged that kept blacks in a condition much like slavery.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces the triangular trade route, in which 17th-century merchants sailed the Atlantic Ocean in a path between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Eventually, African slaves became part of this system.
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Professor Edward T. O'Donnell analyzes an 1876 Harper's Weekly cartoon of an Irish immigrant, which reveals the racism of the day.
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Historian Carroll Gibbs discusses African American life in Georgetown prior to and just after the Civil War, looking at laws that discriminated against and segregated African Americans, at historic churches in the area, at records that suggest African Americans escaped from Georgetown by the Underground Railroad, and at reactions to African Americans' gaining the right to vote.
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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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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.
Teachers of all levels and settings are invited to join Spertus Museum educators to tour the new exhibition "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund" and participate in an interactive printmaking workshop with Master Printer Thomas Lucas.
From 1919 to 1929, Langston Hughes noted, "Harlem was in vogue." Black painters and sculptors joined writers and musicians in an artistic outpouring that established Harlem as the international capital of African American culture. Participants will study the evolution of the Harlem Renaissance through the music of Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, the art of painter Archibald Motley and sculptor Augusta Savage, and the literary works of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer, among others.