In this video from ThinkTV Dayton, learn about Harriet Beecher Stowe and the basis of her famous book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that documented racial injustice before the Civil War.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

This freedom seeker traveled from St. Louis, Missouri to Racine, Wisconsin, and later to Canada, aided by abolitionists and the Underground Railroad. His story is part of a series of events that led to the declaration of the end of slavery in the United States.

Resources available for exploring this story include:
- A short animated video with captions and transcripts in English and Spanish
- A short biography book accessible as a slide deck, with per-page audio for listening along, and maps of key locations in the story
- Questions that can be used for conversation, reflection, and connection with the story
- A historical image gallery full of primary and secondary sources to explore
- A guide for activating the media with learners that includes story stats, extension activity ideas, and standards supported

This story is part of Wisconsin Biographies, a collection of educational media resources for grades 3-6. Explore the full collection at pbswisconsineducation.org/biographies.

Provides an introduction to legal and institutional arrangements for the establishment, transfer, and control over property under US and selected comparative systems including India and South Africa. Situates the debate about property in the context of international development and planning. Examines the relationship to the use of land by individuals, entities, communities, and the State through "private" and "public" regulation. Emphasis on efficient resource use, institutional, entitlement, and cultural approaches to property, distribution, and other social aspects, and the relationship between property, culture, and democracy. This course is designed to offer an advanced introduction to key legal issues that arise in the area of property and land-use in American law, with a comparative focus on the laws of India and South Africa. The focus of the course is not on law itself, but on the policy implications of various rules, doctrines and practices which are covered in great detail. Legal rules regulating property are among the most fundamental to American, and most other, economies and societies. The main focus is on American property and land use law due to its prominence in international development policy and practice as a model, though substantial comparative legal materials are also introduced from selected non-western countries such as India and South Africa.

This course explores the history of the ideal of personal freedom with an eye towards contemporary debates over the pros and cons of the regulatory state. The first part of the course surveys the sociological and theological sources of the concepts of freedom and civil society, and introduces liberty's leading relatives or competitors: property, equality, community, and republicanism. The second part consists of a series of case studies in the rise of modern liberty and libertarianism: the abolition of slavery, the struggle for religious freedom, and the twentieth-century American civil liberties movement. In the last part of the course, we take up debates over the role of libertarianism vs. the regulatory state in a variety of contexts: counter-terrorism, health care, the financial markets, and the Internet.

This lesson provides background information and lessons (correlated to academic standards) that incorporate the use of textbooks, maps, and discussions based on primary documents such as the U.S. Constitution. In this lesson students will examine the declaration of war with Mexico and the protests of those who opposed this act. They will also explore protesters of conscience against wars other than the Mexican War.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of America 1789-1820: Living the Revolution. Primary source materials include autobiographies, plays, essays, orations, addresses, political documents, letters, poems, cartoons, and more. Resources are divided into the topics: Predicament, Religion, Politics, Expansion, and Equality.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of The Making of African American Identity: Volume 1: 1500-1865. Primary source materials include narratives, photographs, letters, memoirs, songs, newspapers, petitions, addresses, journals, paintings and more. Sources are divided into the topics: Freedom, Enslavement, Community, Identity, and Emancipation.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of The Making of African American Identity, Volume 2: 1865-1917. Primary source materials include paintings, sculpture, narratives, autobiographies, short stories, essays, songs, letters, poems, photographs, interviews, and more. Sources are divided into the topics: Freedom, Identity, Institutions, Politics, and Forward.

From the site:
Developed for use in middle and high school classrooms, Mission US engages students in the study of transformational moments in American history. Each mission consists of an interactive game and a set of curriculum materials that are aligned to national standards and feature document-based activities. The game immerses players in rich, historical settings and then empowers them to make choices that illuminate how ordinary people experienced the past. The Educator's Guide provides a wealth of resources and activities for both teachers and students, including primary source documents that show the broader social, political, and economic context of events and perspectives featured in the game.

Slavery was embedded into America’s fabric by the time of the framing and ratification of the Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, the delegates refused to write the word “slavery” or enshrine a “right to property in men” in the Constitution’s text, but they did compromise on the issue of slavery, writing important protections for slaveholders into our nation’s charter. Debates over slavery continued (and increased) in the decades to come, culminating in Abraham Lincoln’s election as America’s first anti-slavery president, Southern secession, and the Civil War. Following this bloody war, the Reconstruction Republicans worked to rebuild our nation on a stronger constitutional foundation, passing our nation’s first civil rights laws and ratifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. These amendments ended slavery, wrote the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution, and promised to end racial discrimination in voting. Many scholars refer to this key period as America’s “Second Founding.”

This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history. Lesson includes objectives and standards, sample lyrics, lesson plan, assessment and extension activities.

Throughout this unit on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, students practice the same six skills with greater scaffolding and modeling at the beginning, and more independence toward the middle and end. The tasks include: 1. writing to an essential question to access background knowledge; 2. using context clues and root words to determine word meaning; 3. close reading with the aid of a glossary; 4. taking notes one of two graphic organizers (sequence of events and/or empathy map); 5. re-reading to answer text dependent questions; and 6. summarizing the chapter.

The North Star has been an important symbol in the African American community. A beacon of hope and freedom for some, a symbol of knowledge and information for others and a celestial representation of purpose and reason. On this website, students will explore African American history through digital activities on the Smithsonian Learning Lab platform. The activities, or collections, have gathered objects, stories, videos and thinking questions all in one place. It allows students to work through a "Learning Lab" and analyze primary objects in the museum to learn how to practice Historical Thinking, Reading Silences, Change & Continuity & Historical Context.

This lesson looks at how proponents of slavery in antebellum America defended it as a positive good. America in Class Lessons are tailored to meet the Common Core State Standards. The Lessons present challenging primary resources in a classroom-ready format, with background information and analytical strategies that enable teachers and students to subject texts and images to the close reading called for in the Standards.

This lesson looks at how some American Christians in the nineteenth century came to see slavery as something that needed to be abolished. America in Class Lessons are tailored to meet the Common Core State Standards. The Lessons present challenging primary resources in a classroom-ready format, with background information and analytical strategies that enable teachers and students to subject texts and images to the close reading called for in the Standards.

This course uses readings and discussions to focus on a series of short-term events that shed light on American politics, culture, and social organization. It emphasizes finding ways to make sense of these complicated, highly traumatic events, and on using them to understand larger processes of change in American history. The class also gives students experience with primary documentation research through a term paper assignment.

As an enslaved person, Sally Hemings struggled to improve her family’s prospects as she labored under the institution of slavery. By dividing her life into four major stages, students will encounter the difficult choices forced upon enslaved women by an evil institution.
Students will be able to evaluate the choices available to enslaved women like Sally Hemings.
Students will use the four essential themes to analyze and discuss Sally Hemings’s impact on her family and plantation community at Monticello.
Either individually or as a group, students will present and support their theme and its relevance to Sally Hemings’s life in a cohesive and factual statement using information and knowledge gained from class materials and discussion.

In this video segment from EGG: the arts show, learn about the Gullah/Geechee culture of Sapelo Island.

The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more.

Search the Atlantic Slave Trade or the Intra-America Slave Trade, as well as the people and images of victims and lesson plans that teach students how to use the data.