Material Culture
An excellent preparation for using such sources is a trip
to the fine list of online sources for “Material
Culture in the Classroom,” at this website created
by the “Bozeman Teaching American History”
project at Montana State University:
http://www.bozeman.k12.mt.us/history/docs/MaterialCultureClassroom.doc
There are two good website pages on the New York African
Burial Ground. This one from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/protest_reform/
slave_island_02.shtml
And this one from the “Slavery in America”
website, which also provides a lesson plan associated
with the essay:
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_burial_ground.htm
Gabriel's Rebellion:
You and your students may also want to read Douglas Egerton’s
book-length study: Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia
Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
And this website from PBS offers a good brief treatment
of the subject:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
part3/3p1576.html
For Poplar Forest, link to the “Archaeology”
section of the Poplar Forest Plantation Website for
more details on the excavations and their implications
for the history of slaves and slavery:
http://www.poplarforest.org/ARCH/archcommunity.html
Poplar Forest, of course, was only one of Jefferson’s
plantations, and the “Plantation Life and Slavery”
section of the website for his home, Monticello, provides
more useful material about the material culture and
history of slave life:
http://www.monticello.org/reports/
index.php#plantation
The website on the reconstruction of Williamsburg, Virginia’s
colonial capital, is also a good source of information
on material culture and life under the slave system.
If your computer will support the download, look at
Colonial Williamsburg’s “Day in the Life”
series, which provides a wealth of material for discussions
on material culture from the Williamsburg reconstruction:
http://www.history.org/History/teaching/
Dayseries/ditl_index.cfm
Look, as well, at this “Scrapbook” of eighteenth-century
African American clothing from Colonial Williamsburg:
http://www.history.org/history/clothing/intro/aa_cover.cfm
The “African-Americans” section of Williamsburg’s
“Meet the People” segment is a rich resource
on the eighteenth century, geared to classroom needs:
http://www.history.org/Almanack/people/african/aahdr.cfm
In fact, you may want to bookmark Colonial Williamsburg’s
“Teacher Resources” section for future reference:
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/index.cfm
This page on Herbert Aptheker from the website of “Education
on the Internet and Teaching History on Line”
will give students some idea of the range of Aptheker’s
interests, as well as a good reading list of his works
on both slave and free African Americans:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/HISaptheker.htm
For a closer look at a regional slave marketplace, look
on the Mississippi Historical Society's website at:
http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/features/feature36/forks_of_the_road.html
For a useful source on the history and use of slave
badges, see this book, which also provides a good collection
of the images of these symbols:
Greene, Harlan et al. Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire
System in Charleston, South Carolina,1783-1865
(Jefferson, NC.: McFarland and Company, 2003).
