Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez and Nqobile Mthethwa. 25 pages.
A mixer role play explores the connections between different social movements during Reconstruction.
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Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
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Book — Fiction. By Christopher Paul Curtis. 2018. 256 pages.
A novel for young adults that that shows how slavery was state-sanctioned terrorism and the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law.
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People who had escaped from slavery and were following the Union Army, were blocked from crossing the Ebenezer Creek, leading to their death.
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The mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians was ordered by President Abraham Lincoln.
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Abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Tubman, perhaps the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, engineered her first rescue mission in December 1850.
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African Americans across the United States, free and enslaved, in the North and South, held watch meetings for the abolition of slavery.
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U.S. Marshals arrested Shadrach Minkins, who had escaped from slavery in Norfolk, Virginia.
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The U.S. War Department authorized the governor of Massachusetts to recruit Black troops to the Union Army in the Civil War.
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During the Reconstruction Era, people emancipated from slavery searched for their loved ones throughout the United States and Canada. They often used "last seen" ads. This is one case of successful reunification.
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Picture book. By Janet Halfmann. Illustrated by London Ladd. 2018. 40 pages.
Tells the story of Lilly Ann Granderson, an enslaved woman who taught hundreds of people in Kentucky and Mississippi to read.
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Digital collection. Crowdsourcing project that provides access to information, through thousands of print advertisements, about freedom-seekers and their would-be enslavers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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Confederate troops massacred over 500 surrendering Union soldiers, majority African American, at the Civil War Battle of Fort Pillow.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez.
Through a mixer activity, students encounter how enslaved people resisted the brutal exploitation of slavery. The lesson culminates in a collective class poem highlighting the defiance of the enslaved.
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The federal government compensated the “owners” of enslaved people for their “loss of property.” The people whose labor and families were stolen for generations were not compensated nor given any assistance for the transition to freedom.
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Harriet Tubman helped rescue Charles Nalle, a fugitive from slavery in Virginia, in Troy, New York.
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Film. Directed by Edward Zwick. 1989. 122 minutes.
The all-Black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment is brought to the screen in this star-studded Civil War film.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Arisa White and Laura Atkins. 2019. 112 pages.
An illustrated children's book tells the story of real-life champion for civil rights Bridget "Biddy" Mason.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. 2019. 176 pages.
This book blends traditional biography with illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Harriet Tubman.
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Digital collection.
Through this website, over 130,000 voyages made in the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade can be searched, filtered, and sorted by variables including the port of origin, the number of enslaved Africans on board, and the ship's name.
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A volunteer infantryman performed an act of courage that was the earliest event to earn an African American soldier the Medal of Honor.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students discover “echoes of enslavement” in their own state — discrete sites of remembering, forgetting, honoring, lying, or distorting — in this lesson based on the book How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.
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Teaching Activity. By Nathanial W. Smith. Rethinking Schools. 6 pages.
A teacher describes a series of lessons he teaches to help his students understand race as a social construct.
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Teaching Guide. By James W. Loewen. 2010. 264 pages.
A wealth of ideas on how to rethink the teaching of U.S. history.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta. 2010. 484 pages.
Primary documents on the causes of the Civil War.
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