Teaching Activity. By Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
The stories of twenty people whose lives were touched by the New Deal of the 1930s come to life in this classroom activity, intended to open students' minds to the possibilities of a Green New Deal.
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The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, on the eve of Passover, when Nazi forces attempted to clear out the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, to send them to concentration camps.
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Book - Picture book. By Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Floyd Cooper. 2021. 32 pp.
This children's book centers the history of the thriving Black community of Greenwood before the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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Book - Non-fiction. Written and illustrated by Sharon Rudahl. Edited by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware. 2020. 142 pages. The first-ever graphic biography of Paul Robeson charts Robeson’s career as a singer, actor, scholar, athlete, and activist who achieved global fame.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
Students explore three documents produced in the wake of three major episodes of racial violence (1919, 1967, 2014) to understand the long trajectory of police violence in Black communities.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis with Komozi Woodard. 352 pages. 2019.
This important work shows how the Jim Crow North maintained inequality in the nation’s most liberal places, and chronicles how activists worked to undo those inequities born of Northern Jim Crow.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Barbara Ransby. 2005. 495 pages.
This biography chronicles Baker's long and rich political career as an organizer, an intellectual, and a teacher, from her early experiences in depression-era Harlem to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Barbara Ransby. 2013. 373 pages.
This biography of cosmopolitan anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson explores her influence on her husband's early career, their open marriage, and her life as a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, and an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist.
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Film. Directed by Phillip Noyce. 2002. 79 minutes.
In 1931, three aboriginal girls escape after being plucked from their homes to be trained as domestic staff and set off on a journey across the Outback.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
A simulation helps students understand the causes of economic crises.
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Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
Through role play, students explore how different social groups influenced New Deal legislation.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Cameron McWhirter. 2012. 368 pages.
A chronicle of white supremacist violence in major U.S. cities across the nation after World War I.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Eve L. Ewing. 96 pages. 2019.
Poetic reflections on the Chicago Race Riots of 1919 — part of 'Red Summer' — in a history told through Ewing's speculative and Afrofuturist lenses.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. Adapted by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and Eric S. Singer. Vol 1. 400 pages. 2014. Vol 2. 320 pages. 2019.
These are two volumes of illustrated histories, adapted for students from a documentary book and film of the same name.
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A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, made the official call for a march on Washington, with the demand to end segregation in defense industries.
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Jews in the Warsaw ghetto organized armed self-defense units to oppose deportations to forced-labor camps and to the Treblinka extermination camp.
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Book – Historical fiction. By Margarita Engle. 2018. 192 pages.
A novel that uses free verse to tell the story of the 1943 Zoot Suit (or Sailor) Riots through a wide range of characters.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
In this role play students analyze who is to blame for the illegal, mass deportations of Mexican Americans and immigrants during the Great Depression.
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Sept. 4 marks the end of fighting at the Battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest example of class war in U.S. history.
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The Battle of the Overpass occurred when union members were beaten by Ford Motor Co. reps for distributing leaflets.
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The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 reached a settlement with union recognition and reinstatement for all fired workers.
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Lorraine Hansberry was an author and activist who wrote "A Raisin in the Sun."
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Teaching Activity. By Linda Christensen. Rethinking Schools.
Teaching about racist patterns of murder, theft, displacement, and wealth inequality through the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Laura Atkins and Stan Yogi. Illustrated by Yutaka Houlette. 2017. 112 pages.
Story of Fred Koretmatsu, jailed for resisting internment by the U.S. government during WWII. He took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court twice.
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Book - Non-fiction. By Richard Rothstein. 2017.
A history of the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments that promoted racial segregation.
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