This supplemental lesson/activity from the Center for Civic Education looks at the concept of executive power and the challenges Lincoln faced as president. Students are asked to analyze and evaluate President Lincoln's decisions as they relate to decisions made during the Civil War.

This collection uses primary sources to explore The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. 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.

Examines in detail the works of several American authors. Through close readings of poetry, novels, or plays, subject addresses such issues as literary influence, cultural diversity, and the writer's career. Topic: American Women Authors. This subject, crosslisted in Literature and Women's Studies, examines a range of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present. It aims to introduce a number of literary genres and styles- the captivity narrative, slave novel, sensational, sentimental, realistic, and postmodern fiction- and also to address significant historical events in American women's history: Puritanism, the American Revolution, industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, the 60s civil rights movements. A primary focus will be themes studied and understood through the lens of gender: war, violence, and sexual exploitation (Keller, Rowlandson, Rowson); the relationship between women and religion (Rowlandson, Rowson, Stowe); labor, poverty, and working conditions for women (Fern, Davis, Wharton); captivity and slavery (Rowlandson, Jacobs); class struggle (Fern, Davis, Wharton, Larsen); race and identity (Keller, Jacobs, Larsen, Morrison); feminist revisions of history (Stowe, Morrison, Keller); and the myth of the fallen woman (take your pick). Essays and inclass reports will focus more particularly on specific writers and themes and will stress the skills of close reading, annotation, research, and uses of multimedia where appropriate. A classroom electronic archive has been developed for this course and will be available as a resource for images and other media materials.

This course provides a basic history of American social, economic, and political development from the colonial period through the Civil War. It examines the colonial heritages of Spanish and British America; the American Revolution and its impact; the establishment and growth of the new nation; and the Civil War, its background, character, and impact. Readings include writings of the period by J. Winthrop, T. Paine, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, W. H. Garrison, G. Fitzhugh, H. B. Stowe, and A. Lincoln.

America's Black Holocaust Museum's website is a virtual museum where one can:
Discover seldom-told stories in our Online History Galleries.
Plan your in-person visit to our On-Site museum's galleries.
Find out what the only publicly-known survivor of a US lynching did with the rest of his long life.
Learn about present and past challenges facing the African American community in our Breaking News blog.

ABHM is a one-of-a-kind historical and memorial museum about the Black Holocaust in America.

This lesson presents documents produced around and during the historic 1841 trial of 53 Africans, captured and sold as slaves, and subsequently accused of murder for commandeering the slave ship, Amistad, and killing its captain and cook. The site also contains a detailed lesson plan.

In July 1839, captive West Africans rebelled and took over the Spanish slaveship Amistad . They ordered the owners to Africa but, instead, the Amistad was taken on a meandering course, finally waylaid by a U.S. Navy brig. The Africans were charged with the murder of the captain and jailed in New Haven, Connecticut. Abolitionists came to their support; ex-President John Quincy Adams represented them in court. After a long legal battle, the Supreme Court freed the "mutineers" in 1841. The following year they returned to Africa.

The National Humanities center presents reading guides with primary source materials for the study of the British Atlantic Colonies 1690-1763: Becoming American. Primary source materials include letters, pamphlets, journals, newspapers, maps, paintings, poems, and more. Resources are divided into the topics: Growth, Peoples, Economies, Ideas, and American.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Toni Morrison's Beloved. 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.

In this video segment from EGG: the arts show, Sapelo Island resident, Ben Hall, guides viewers through an introduction to Sapelo Island which is inhabited by the descendants of African slaves.

In 1792, recent college graduate Eli Whitney moved to Georgia to work as a tutor on a plantation. There, Whitney learned that southern planters were eager to make cotton a profitable crop. Once cotton was picked from the field, seeds had to be removed from the cotton fiber by hand before cotton could be sold. This process was labor-intensive and time-consuming, and it limited the amount of cotton that planters, relying on the work of enslaved people, could produce.

In this lesson, students will explore the role played by perspective and point-of-view in an examination of American slavery. Students will look at the early history of widespread slavery in colonial America, and the ways in which some Northern slaves chose to deal with their situation amidst the chaos of the American Revolution. Utilizing the PBS series SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, students will examine the life of Titus, a runaway slave from New Jersey who led a band of guerilla soldiers for the British, and explore why and how African-Americans fought during the Revolution. Following their examination of Titus, students will utilize a variety of online interactive resources to examine the experiences of runaway slaves throughout the history of American slavery. As a culminating activity, students will creatively write journal entries from a variety of historical perspectives, including slave, runaway slave, slave owner, and British soldier.This lesson can be used as a pre- or post- viewing activity for the PBS series SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, or as an independent lesson for the social studies/history classroom. A basic knowledge of the slavery in the United States, as well as a familiarity with the American Revolution, is required. (taken from the website)

This lesson looks at how the cult of domesticity oppressed and empowered women in the Nineteenth Century United Staets. 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.

EVERFI is a free online learning platform that provides free digital mini-courses to K-12 teachers. You will need to create an account, but then all access is free! This course can be assigned to students to work on individually, and will score assessments. It divides African American History into 4 periods, followed by a summative capstone essay:

1. Slavery Period: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Phyllis Wheatley, Underground Railroad
2. Emancipation & Reconstruction Period: Frederick Douglass, Hiram Revels
3. Jim Crow Period: Tuskegee Institute, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harlem Renaissance
4. Civil Rights Period & Beyond: Brown v. Board of Education, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Rides,
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Mae Jemison
5. Capstone Essay

This site provides a lesson that uses primary documents such as the Emancipation Proclamation. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences. It also has cross-curricular connections with history, government, and language arts.

In this video segment from EGG: the arts show, resident Frankie Quimby discusses the African slaves' history on Sapelo Island. Singers perform Swing Low Sweet Chariot.

This collection uses primary sources to compare and explore the relationships between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. 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.

The National Humanities center presents this collection of essays by leading scholars on the topic ŇFreedomŐs Story: Teaching African American Literature and HistoryÓ. Topics include the affect of slavery on families, slave resistance, how to read slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, reconstruction, segregation, pigmentocracy, protest poetry, jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.

This lesson encourages students to analyze historic documents related to two fugitive slave cases and determine the impact events of the period 1850 to 1860 had on them. The Henry Garnett and Moses Honner cases demonstrates the political crisis in the 1850s arising over the issue of slavery and the necessity for the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences.

This lesson is the third and final part of the History's Mysteries unit, "What Makes a Good Leader?" In this lesson, students explore that leaders often make complex decisions and don’t always display positive leadership traits. While learning about George Washington’s use of slave labor throughout his life, students realize that even leaders are rarely perfect and can make poor decisions. This difficult topic is displayed in through the use of images and pictures and discussed in vocabulary appropriate for young learners.
This lesson is part of a unit containing the following lessons:
Grade 1: Unit 2 History Mystery 1: WHAT MAKES SOMEONE A GOOD LEADER?
Grade 1: Unit 2 History Mystery 2: WHAT MADE PEOPLE THINK GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD BE A GOOD LEADER?