Bibliography and Additional Resources

Books/Articles/Essays

• "Changing Secondary Teachers’ Views of Teaching American History,” by Rachel Ragland, The History Teacher, 40:2 Feb., 2007, pp. 219-246. Changing teaching practices in secondary history classrooms requires teachers to first change their attitudes and views towards teaching history. The article contains a summary of teachers’ practices, ideas, and attitudes about teaching history before participating in a Teaching American History grant project, the professional development activities that took place with the goal of changing these attitudes and practices, and a summary of the new ideas and practices that were document after the program.

• "Interpreting Slavery with Children and Teens," by Kristin Gallas, History News - Technical Leaflet, 2021. Strategies for teaching an inclusive history of slavery.

• Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, by Seth Rockman. An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

• Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Early American Studies), edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. "During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence." (PennPress)

• "The Extensive Economic and Political Connections between Lowell and Southern States" Essay, Dr. Gray Fitzsimons. A more in-depth look at the long and deep economic and political connections between Lowell's manufacturing elite and Southern planters and politicians.

• Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology), by Angela Lakwete. Explores the history of the cotton gin as an aspect of global history and an artifact of southern industrial development. 

Videos

• "Contradictory Place: Cotton Mills Alongside Anti-Slavery Efforts," by Robert Forrant and Maritza Grooms. The film describes the extraordinary anti-slavery efforts taking place in the mid-19th century in Lowell. Forrant and Grooms visit the sites that still exist in downtown Lowell where abolitionist activity occurred and where freedom seekers operated businesses. 

Websites

• “Race in US History,” Facing History and Ourselves. The history of race in America encompasses questions of freedom, justice, equality, and citizenship. Explore topics including the Reconstruction era, the once-influential theories of eugenics, the modern Civil Rights Movement, and current struggles over racial equity. This website provides access to books, lessons, videos, and other resources for teaching a wide range of topics relating to the African American experience in the United States.

• "Teaching Hard History,” Southern Poverty Law Center. Our students deserve an honest account of our nation’s history. These resources – videos, readings, lesson plans – will help you tell a more complete story of American slavery that starts with Indigenous enslavement and includes students of all ages. To teach our students the truth about our shared hard history, we need to start where the stories—and the learning—begin.