Digital collection. Documents that help explain how Black people traversed the bloody ground from slavery to freedom between the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and the beginning of Reconstruction in 1867.
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Digital collection. Collections as data and machine learning project examining Jim Crow and racially-based legislation signed into law in North Carolina between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.
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A community of armed Black men and women in Christiana, Pennsylvania successfully defended four Black people from capture, serving as a catalyst for further armed self-defense within the abolitionist movement.
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U.S. scientist and women’s rights activist Eunice Newton Foote confirmed Fourier’s theory that atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide trap heat in the atmosphere, a phenomenon that would come to be known as the “greenhouse effect.”
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Book — Non-fiction. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar, with Candace Buford. 2023. 288 pages.
A biography of Susie King Taylor, a nurse, teacher, and freedom fighter.
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More than 100 textile workers died when a mill collapsed due to inadequate construction.
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Picture book. By Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by James E. Ransome. 2024. 40 pages.
Shows how one enslaved man, secretly named Teach, helps others learn to read and write wherever he can.
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Book — Non-fiction. By . 2024. 256 pages.
This young adult history offers a researched account with first-hand testimonies of how people in bondage were themselves a driving force behind their own emancipation.
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Book — Non-fiction. By John Swanson Jacobs. 2024. 288 pages.
A first-person narrative of the enslaved, lost for 169 years, now reproduced in full.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
In this lesson, students explore many of the real challenges faced by abolitionists with a focus on the American Anti-Slavery Society.
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Article. By James W. Loewen. July 2015 in the Washington Post.
A critique of textbook and mainstream media coverage of the Civil War.
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An abolitionist raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in an attempt to start an armed revolt against the institution of slavery.
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Mother’s Day began as a call to action for healthcare and against war. Activism continues today with #FreeBlackMamas and more.
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Cinco de Mayo is actually the Battle of Puebla Day, commemorating the defeat of Napoleon III in 1862.
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John Brown, Martin Delany, and others gathered for a Constitutional Convention in Chatham, Canada.
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The mass execution of 38 Dakota Indians was ordered by President Abraham Lincoln.
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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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Book — Non-fiction. By Martha S. Jones. 2018. 266 pages.
The story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Hilary N. Green. 2025. 400 pages.
The untold stories of ordinary African Americans who took extraordinary steps in remembrance and resistance during and after the Civil War.
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Book — Historical fiction. By Amina Luqman-Dawson. 2023. 416 pages.
A lyrical, accessible historical middle-grade novel about two enslaved children‘s escape from a plantation and the many ways they find freedom.
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The New York City Draft Massacre (“Riots”) were the largest civil insurrection in U.S. history besides the Civil War itself. White mobs attacked the African American community — committing murder and burning homes and institutions (including an orphanage.)
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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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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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In his 1860 speech commemorating radical abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass argued that slavery would only end if the slave owner feared the violent retribution of the enslaved.
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At a rally sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, angry and determined abolitionists burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Constitution.
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