A collection of more than a dozen people's history stories from July 4th beyond 1776. The stories include July 4th anniversaries such as when slavery was abolished in New York (1827), Frederick Douglass's speech "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" (1852), the Reconstruction era attack on a Black militia that led to the Hamburg Massacre (1876), protest of segregation at an amusement park in Baltimore (1963), and more.
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Teaching Activity. By Rosemarie Frascella. Rethinking Schools.
Our extractive fossil fuel-based economy has always demanded that some people’s homes and health be sacrificed for the benefit of more privileged and powerful others. This article explores how one teacher engages her students in thinking about how “sacrifice zones” play out in their lives.
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Article. By Hannah Jones.
The global movement to get institutions to divest from fossil fuels began with students. This article tells the inspiring story.
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Article. By Jill Howdyshell.
The author describes how climate change is hitting Indigenous communities in Alaska much harder than other places in the world. And yet, administrators still insist that school discussions should focus on student test scores.
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools. 20 pages.
Teaching about racist patterns of murder, theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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Teaching Guide. Edited by Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, Wayne Au. 2018. Rethinking Schools. 368 pages.
Essays, teaching activities, role plays, poems, and artwork, designed to illuminate the movement for Black students' lives, the school-to-prison-pipeline, Black history, gentrification, intersectional Black identities, and more.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Russell Duncan. 1986. 192 pages.
Freedom’s Shore tells the incredible story of Tunis Campbell, a Northern abolitionist minister who heads South after the Civil War to help freedpeople in Georgia.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Tonya Bolden. 2014. 138 pages.
One of the few non-fiction texts on Reconstruction aimed at young readers, Cause is a strong alternative to the textbook treatment of the era.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Manisha Sinha. 2017. 784 pages.
A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.
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Article. By Richard Rothstein. 2017. If We Knew Our History series.
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Film clip. Voices of a People's History.
Harriet Hanson Robinson's "Characteristics of the Early Factory Girls" (1898) read by Lili Taylor.
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Book — Non-fiction. By National Museum of the American Indian. 2007. 256 pages.
Introduction to Native American history and contemporary culture.
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Picture book. By Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez. 2017. 48 pages.
This picture book is a tribute to Arturo Schomburg, the Afro Puerto Rican historian collector and activist who chronicled the Black history of the Diaspora.
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Book — Historical fiction. By Tonya Bolden. 2017. 240 pages.
A moving account of the Civil War massacre at Ebenezer Creek in Georgia.
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Profile.
Charles Sumner, Civil War and Reconstruction era politician in the United States.
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Digital collection. This website publishes thousands of “Information Wanted” advertisements taken out by people freed from slavery who are searching for family members who had been sold apart.
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Film. Center for Investigative Reporting and Two Tone Productions. 2007. 84 minutes.
Filmmaker Marco Williams examined four examples of primarily white communities violently rising up to force their African-American neighbors to flee town.
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Picture book. By Tim Tingle. 2008. 40 pages.
A picture book that highlights rarely discussed intersections between Native Americans in the South and African Americans in bondage.
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Book — Fiction. By Susan Follett. 2014. 389 pages.
A young adult novel of historical fiction based on Freedom Summer.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Gilbert R. Mason. 2007. 227 pages.
Dr. Gilbert R. Mason’s eyewitness account of the fight for racial justice on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi during the civil rights movement.
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Book — Non-fiction. By M.J. O'Brien. 2014. 340 pages.
An up-close study of the story behind the iconic photographs of the Jackson, Mississippi sit-ins.
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Book — Fiction. By Pamela M Tuck. Illustrated by Eric Velasquez. 2013. 32 pages.
Based on her father’s experience in 1960s North Carolina, Pamela Tuck tells how a family and community challenge racism where they work, shop, and go to school.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Barbara Miner. 2013. 305 pages.
The history of public education in Milwaukee in the context of the broader story of racism in the rust belt.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Stewart Burns 1997. 392 pages.
A documentary history of the Montgomery bus boycott that reverberates with the voices of those closest to the boycott.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Cynthia Levinson. 2012. 176 pages.
Tells the story of the 4,000 Black elementary, middle, and high school students who voluntarily went to jail between May 2 and May 11, 1963.
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