General Resources

• Background on how the US Constitution was formed: You can read as much as you like on this open-source textbook online: The American Yawp section on the American Revolution
• First political parties - the difference between Federalists (Hamiltonians) and Republicans (Jeffersonians)
• Jefferson: deleted paragraph on slavery from the Declaration of Independence, Slavery at Monticello, reply to Benjamin Banneker (see p. 4 of this doc)
• transcripts of film clips we showed in class:
  • "Louisiana Purchase" segment of Slavery and the Making of America,
  • Nat Turner film
• Macon Bolling Allen, first licensed Black lawyer 1844 & others
• National Museum of African American History and Culture - NYTimes virtual tour
• David Walker Memorial Project
• Music - Gullah Geechee & Kumbaya credit
• Frederick Douglass
  1. online version of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (complete text)
  2. Rochester Home
  3. National Historic Site District of Columbia & C-SPAN video
  4. Baltimore 1 & Baltimore 2 - Home Story
  5. Letter to Mary Todd Lincoln
  6. Trump and Frederick Douglass (Washington Post)
  7. Biography.com
• Sojourner Truth information from Biography.com and from PBS.org
• Ida B. Wells - New York Times Adds Obituary
• New Portrait of Harriet Tubman (The Root)
• Narratives of the Enslaved - various readings we used to create our quits commemorating the enslaved people
• African American Quilting Tradition from the U of Virginia - see especially how they were used to "signal" & do "record keeping" when, under enslavement, most enslaved people were prevented from learning to read or write
• Suzan Shown Harjo, "We Have No Reason to Celebrate an Invasion" (pp. 7-8 of 1991 edition of Rethinking Columbus) Read more about her in this article.
• How did Douglass learn to read & write? You can read that part of the Narrative here, starting on p. 40.
• "We Take Nothing by Conquest" - Howard Zinn
• The US-Mexico Border presentation of images - consider what those imply about the border and the US population

The Civil War

• maps & timeline: timeline with map on one page & larger map showing the two regions and battles
• Why was "Indian Territory" (later Oklahoma) part of the Confederacy? See this source from Oklahoma Historical Society
• Who/What Freed the Enslaved? documents from Free At Last exploring multiple factors in the realization of emancipation
• Gettysburg: Two poems on the Battle of Gettysburg, National Park Service background on the battle and the cemetery and Address, NPR story on the Confederate Monuments debate and the Gettysburg Memorial site
• Economic Effects of Sherman's March (Stanford)
• Emancipation Proclamation: remember to check CDW for the text, Union soldiers use “John Brown’s Body” as a marching song (see AR p. 256 or this link for lyrics), Douglass calls on African American men to join the Union army (CDW 237-239), and units with African Americans sing songs like “Marching Song of the First Arkansas” lyrics (hear the Sweet Honey in the Rock version here)
• 13th Amendment: history of how it came about
• Crash Course: Civil War Part Two