138 items
Background Women always played a significant role in the struggle against slavery and discrimination. White and black Quaker women and female slaves took a strong moral stand against slavery. As abolitionists, they circulated...
Militancy and the Abolitionist Movement
Essential Question Did militancy help or hinder the abolitionist movement? Materials Abolition Excerpts (PDF) Timeline of the Abolitionist Movement (PDF) Background Although the original Constitution of the United States did not...
Who Was John Brown?
"Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic." —Frederick Douglass Background The late 1840s and the 1850s were a turbulent and complex time in American history as the...
A Different Perspective on Slavery: Writing the History of African American Enslaved Women
Introduction The accounts of African American slavery in textbooks routinely conflate the story of enslaved men and women into one history. Textbooks rarely enable students to grapple with the lives and challenges of women constrained...
Enslaved African Americans and Expressions of Freedom
Overview Students will examine African American slave spirituals, a painting, and a personal narrative to analyze the underlying messages of these materials. Materials The Old Plantation (painting) can be seen at: http://www.history...
A Look at Slavery through Posters and Broadsides
Overview Students will examine posters and broadsides from the 1800s to examine attitudes about slavery in the United States at that time. Materials Overhead or copies for all students of the poster packet (PDF) Poster Inquiry Sheet...
Martin Luther King Jr.: His Legacy as Seen Through the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project
Background Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 21, is celebrated by Americans each year to remember and recognize the life and work of the man. Martin Luther King Jr., however, represents far more than the contributions of a single...
Abraham Lincoln on Slavery and Race
Background Slavery played a prominent role in America’s political, social, and economic history in the antebellum era. The "peculiar institution" was at the forefront of discussions ranging from the future of the nation’s economy to...
Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan
Essential Question To what degree was Abraham Lincoln successful in achieving his goals? Background The Civil War was perhaps the most momentous event that the United States endured in its history. Author and historian Shelby Foote...
Challenging Segregation in Public Education
Background The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, during the congressional Reconstruction era. The amendment’s most significant provision —"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or...
Securing the Right to Vote: The Selma-to-Montgomery Story
Essential Question What conditions created the need for a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, and what did that march achieve? Background Throughout American history, African Americans have struggled to gain...
Nonviolent Direct Action at Southern Lunch Counters
Background On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, walked into a Woolworth’s store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. This seemingly...
Singing for Freedom
Background In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, with most non-white families living well below the poverty line. Although African Americans made up nearly half of the state's population, few were...
Democracy in Early America: Servitude and the Treatment of Native Americans and Africans prior to 1740
Essential Questions How did European explorers and colonists who came to the New World for "Gold, Glory and/or God" justify their treatment of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured servants? To what extent were there...
The Supreme Court and the Fourteenth Amendment
Overview: The Founding Fathers created the Supreme Court in Article III of the Constitution of the United States. The most influential role of the Court, however, was defined later through the appeal process, in cases involving the...
Jackie Robinson, WWII, and the Integration of Baseball
Background In the 1940s America was in the throes of a crippling depression and a world war. While all Americans coped with the overwhelming challenges that the economy and war presented, some Americans faced an additional hardship,...
Travels Through Time: The Impact of Supreme Court Decisions on the Struggle for African American Equality
Overview After the Civil War, African Americans were under attack as they struggled for equal rights in America. Laws were put in place during Reconstruction to assure Freedmen basic civil rights. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and...
Montgomery to the Supreme Court
Overview Students will examine primary source documents and photographs to explain how local events lead to cases being presented before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upholds laws that protect the rights of all people and...
Abraham Lincoln: A Man for All Seasons
Overview At one time in our country’s history we stood divided as a nation over the issue of slavery. It was Abraham Lincoln’s ideology and sense of purpose that helped to unite our country and set us on a path toward realizing the...
The Scottsboro Trial
Background In 1932, times were hard for many as jobs were not easy to find and people had difficulty putting food on the table. In March of that year, nine black boys ventured out looking for work only to find themselves caught in a...
Baseball and Race in the United States
Background On April 15, 1947, 27,000 fans packed Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, to watch the Dodgers' new first baseman take to the field. They came to watch a baseball game, and they came to see a talented 28-year-old rookie,...
Sports and Politics: Making Statements
Introduction In this lesson, elementary school students will debate whether or not prominent athletes should promote political and social issues. The debate will be informed by the activism of Muhammad Ali, who resisted the drafted...
The Promise of Democracy
Source JFK’s Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963 , John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (full text and audio available) Background Information This document will be used to...
First Day of Integration at Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas
Sources Students Entering School Building , National Park Service Book: Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962), or online at Civil Rights Teaching Background Information On the first day of integration at Central High...
Evaluating Lyndon B. Johnson’s Character and Efforts during the Civil Rights Era
Background Information In 1969 Thomas Baker conducted an interview with Roy Wilkins, executive directory of the NAACP, based on Wilkins’s experiences with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. This abridged version of the...
Comparison of Ideas: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois
Essential Question Which of the two views presented below, W.E.B. Du Bois’ or Booker T. Washington’s, offered a better strategy to put our nation on a quicker path to equality for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century...
Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery in the Constitutional Structure
Materials US Constitution , Our Documents Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson . New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001. Essential Question Why did the Founders find it necessary to provide...
Jefferson and Slavery
Background Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence invokes the ideals of democracy and freedom. Yet he remains a slaveholder for his entire adult life, and (unlike George Washington) does not free his slaves in his will....
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech
Unit Overview This unit is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align to the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand,...
Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858
Though Lincoln spoke frequently during the 1858 Illinois Senate race against Stephen Douglas—a campaign that propelled Lincoln to the political forefront and helped shape him into a presidential candidate—very few Lincoln manuscripts...
The horrors of slavery, 1805
Originally circulated in 1805 to educate the public about the treatment of slaves, this broadside, entitled "Injured Humanity," continues to inform twenty-first-century audiences of the true horrors of slavery. As evidenced by this...
Slavery in the New York State census, 1800
While numbers do not explain the everyday realities of slavery in the eighteenth century, they do provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the peculiar institution even in a northern state like New York. This broadside provides figures...
Sergeant Francis Fletcher of the 54th Massachusetts on equal pay for Black soldiers, 1864
Francis H. Fletcher, a 22-year-old clerk from Salem, Massachusetts, enlisted as a private in Company A of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment on February 13, 1863. One year after the regiment left Boston with great fanfare,...
A northerner’s view of southern slavery, 1821
Aurelia Hale of Hartford, Connecticut, offered her impressions of southern life in this letter of June 11, 1821. Hale, then about twenty-two years old, had recently traveled to Washington County, Georgia, to serve as a schoolteacher....
A Ku Klux Klan threat, 1868
This page contains language that may be offensive or inappropriate for some viewers. Reconstruction politics was a catalyst for widespread racism and hatred that freed people experienced throughout the South. The Ku Klux Klan, founded...
A Founding Father on the Missouri Compromise, 1819
In 1819 a courageous group of Northern congressmen and senators opened debate on the most divisive of antebellum political issues—slavery. Since the Quaker petitions of 1790, Congress had been silent on slavery. That silence was...
Frederick Douglass on Jim Crow, 1887
Frederick Douglass tirelessly labored to end slavery but true equality remained out of reach. Despite the successful passage of several Constitutional amendments and federal laws after the Civil War, unwritten rules and Jim Crow laws...
The Big Bang! The Birth of Rock and Roll
Overview In the early 1950s, a new form of music exploded onto the scene, exciting a growing teenage audience while startling many others who preferred the music of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. Popularized by disc jockey Alan Freed in...
American Music Goes to War
Entertainment is always a national asset. Invaluable in time of peace, it is indispensable in wartime. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943 Background Music during World War II had an unprecedented impact on America, both on the home front...
"The whole land is full of blood," 1851
"The whole land is full of blood." These ominous words were uttered by James W. C. Pennington, a former slave and noted abolitionist, in the wake of Thomas Sims’s infamous trial. Sims had escaped from slavery in Georgia before being...
American Colonization Society membership certificate, 1833
When James Madison signed this membership certificate as president of the American Colonization Society in 1833, the organization’s effort to repatriate America’s free black population to Africa had been underway for over a decade. On...
Harriet Beecher Stowe sends Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, 1852
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 inspired her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin . The novel, first serialized in newspapers and then published in 1852 as a two-volume work, enjoyed tremendous success in...
Lincoln on the execution of a slave trader, 1862
This stunning document, a refusal of clemency for a convicted slave trader, stands out among the papers of Abraham Lincoln, a man renowned for his mercy and willingness to pardon. In November 1861, Nathaniel Gordon was convicted of...
Ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, 1866
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in Confederate states still at war with the Union on January 1, 1863, and as a wartime order, it could be reversed by subsequent presidential proclamation,...
A former Confederate officer on slavery and the Civil War, 1907
How can a soldier be proud of the country he defends while at the same time opposed to the cause he is fighting for? John S. Mosby, the renowned Confederate partisan leader, dealt with this moral dilemma years after the Civil War...
Campaigning for the African American vote in Georgia, 1894
In the gubernatorial and local elections of 1894, the Democrats and the newly formed People’s Party or Populist Party vied for black votes in Georgia. Neither the Democrats nor the Populists called for racial equality in their...
Runaway slave ad, 1860
Runaway slave ads were a reality in America as long as slavery existed. Appearing as broadsides and in newspapers, such ads offered monetary rewards from slaveholders for the capture and return of escaped slaves. On May 9, 1860, Enoch...
Jefferson on the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1792
When Thomas Jefferson wrote this letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, three revolutions—the American, French, and Haitian—occupied the minds of these two renowned leaders. While the American Revolution had been won nearly a decade...
Showing results 1 - 50