Seneca Falls, the Women's Movement, and Tying It All Together with Essential Questions

What gets me really excited about teaching history is when I flip through my files, notes, and old worksheets and suddenly get an epiphany about how it all connects together. It is not clear who first said, "history is just one damned thing after another," but the quip could not be more apt to describe how history class can seem to our students if we don't do a better job of showing them these connections.

The period of the 1820s through the Civil War can be especially prone to this problem: Andrew Jackson, nullification & states' rights, Indian Removal, the invention of the cotton gin, Clay's American system, the Missouri Compromise, Second Great Awakening, abolitionism, Seneca Falls, and on and on. The content is extensive.

But as I observed a student teacher's lesson on the cotton gin, and then wrote my post on the market economy, and then about slavery, and then Indian removal, and then opened my folder about the women's movement and Seneca Falls convention in 1848, I came across this scribble on some old notes of mine:

shift from colonial economy ----> industrial economy----> concept of "separate spheres"

And I remembered how all these topics fit together and how important it is to SHOW students that. Or ideally, have them figure it out for themselves.

Using essential questions helps. I like to post a "question of the day" on the board every day. If you do this for all your lessons, you can them have students try to link them all together. History will then be more like "one thing leads to another." In other words, we have to explicitly teach students the historian's tool of CAUSE AND EFFECT. (Although the particular example I'm discussing in this post is more relational than causal, I think.)

There is the risk of oversimplifying, of course. What causes something else to happen is a complex process and not always clear. But helping students understand that one event in history can impact another is worth teaching, even at the risk of sometimes oversimplifying.

Let me elaborate on that. It occurred to me the other day that as I use essential questions to shape lessons and units, they can also be used to shape an ENTIRE SEMESTER.  I have a strong commitment to teaching U.S. history as a narrative, even as I work hard to reveal the messiness and complications of the narrative and alternative points of view.  So, when thinking about the first half of U.S. history, the narrative can follow a path of creating a democratic nation, with an emphasis on economic liberty that will be torn apart by Civil War and have to put itself back together again. An oversimplification? Probably. But keeping a central story line can help us avoid the problem of coverage. We cannot cover everything in U.S. history. So if we focus on Big Ideas, a central narrative, essential questions--or whatever you prefer to call it--we can arrange the curriculum in a way that allows students to make these connections.

One teacher I spoke to recently had a little sign that read "Civil War" on it, and all throughout first semester, he occasionally waves it up in the air when something comes up that shows the splintering of North and South. Is this too simplistic? Maybe. Does it overemphasize the "irrepressible conflict" view of the Civil War? Perhaps. But we can't argue with the fact the Civil War DID HAPPEN. So pointing out to students where we can see signs of the Civil War all the way back in the events of the 1770s or 1790s or 1830s can be really effective in helping students see the big picture. Too often they cannot see the forest through the trees.

So how to connect some of the topics of the antebellum period? As a summative exercise after some of these lessons, I might use a drawing like the one below. I think you could use this in a variety of ways. I would NOT hand it out to students. But I might use an old fashioned chalk board and start with one of the circles. And you could pass out index cards to students that had the phrase of the other circles. Other students would be in charge of the arrows. See if the students can create something that looks like this drawing, either on the board, or in their notes. Or on ipads.

So why is this post all about these connections? What about the women's movement and Seneca Falls?

One of the dangers with focusing too much on the Civil War is that we can overemphasize political history and leave out other good stories. But the story of the women's movement is going to continue into second semester. Eventually, you are going to get to the 19th amendment and the 1970s and ERA, right? And how can you teach those things if you don't establish the back story? (Another reason why I love backstoryradio.org! You've got to check this out. I learn so much from these podcasts!)

But the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 fits beautifully into an antebellum unit. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton getting dissed at the World Antislavery Convention in London. The connections between rights for African Americans and women. (Which will come up again and again, right? The connection between the passage of the 15th amendment and the suffrage movement and then again in the 1970s, when the women's movement follows the civil rights movement).

Lesson Ideas and Materials

And then, of course, you have Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. (See this article that claims Lincoln never said that line about the little lady who started the big war. Isn't it a bummer when we find out those great lines were never actually said? e.g., Jackson, "Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" is another one. Sigh....)

My former colleague (and one of the hardest working teachers I know) Janet Mark was the one who helped our whole U.S. history team do a better job of integrating the study of American women into U.S. history. She introduced me to using an excerpt from chapter 9 of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a way to combine the concept of separate spheres, slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. I have adapted some of her excellent materials below:

• In class activity for teaching the concept of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity.
• See here for questions on UTC you can use with students. I like having them discuss the questions, rather than write them out for homework. To get them to read it ahead of time, I would ask them to turn in at least three examples or underline examples in the text of separate spheres. There are lots of them in this chapter.
• See here for commentary on chapter 9 of the book from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.
• Resources on the cult of domesticity from the National Humanities Center.
• And don't forget Stowe's famous sister, Catherine Beecher. You can build a fascinating lesson around a discussion comparing Catharine Beecher's views and those of Angela Grimke and the ideas embedded in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Use this document with students. You could spend an entire period on this, as it raises the fundamental question of whether men and women are different from each other. Each author argued deeply in support of women's power and influence, but from a completely different place. Beecher fundamentally believes that women and men are naturally different from men. This argument is a precursor to the Supreme Court's decision in Muller v Oregon in 1907.  And the argument goes a long way towards explaining why the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments was not widely supported, and why women would not get the right to vote until 1920. (For more on this, see the last resource in this post.)

Teacher Materials for Using the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments:

• See here for a  side-by-side comparison of the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments.
• See here for a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments that I like because I have numbered each of the grievances for easy reference.
• See here for a similar version that I have edited and abbreviated for middle school students and/or students with lower reading skills. Note that it is still rather complicated, but you can either go over it and explain the confusing parts, or I would propose that students can still get the basic idea even if they don't understand every word.
• See here for a worksheet students can use to take notes and understand the document. Adapted from Janet Mark.

Other places to visit on the web:

• Not yet a brick-and-mortar museum, the National Women's History Museum has some good resources, though they have had some negative press about their level of scholarship.
• The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center - has teacher resources, lessons, primary resources, and sponsors a writing competition for students writing on issues of social justice.
• Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia has created a multimedia exhibit about Uncle Tom's Cabin and its place in American Culture. There are some impressive resources to be found here. Check out this page for information about how abolitionism led to the women's movement. And look here for a letter from Angelina Grimke to Catharine Beecher on what was wrong with the idea of colonizing freed slaves in Africa.
• Indiana and Purdue Universities have created a site devoted to Abolitionism.
• For a short, readable article about the use of essential questions in the history classroom, see Heather Lattimer, "Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom," Social Education, 72, (6) 2008, pp. 326-329. If you are a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) member, you can access it online in their publication archives.
• It may be worth a membership to NCSS just to read this article in their publication archives: Dave Neumann, "A Different Way of Viewing History Teaching: Balancing Competing Intellectual Challenges," Social Education, 74 (4), 2010, pp. 184-188. I thought of it because I recall he uses the topic of whether men and women are fundamentally different as a hook in a lesson on women in the antebellum era. But the whole article is worth reading because he discusses three fundamental challenges in the teaching of history. For each of the three, he refers to the antebellum period. The three include (1) the problem of understanding the past in context while making it relevant in the present; (2) the problem of scale: historical trends become significant as part of larger trends, but gain texture and interest when examined in detail; and (3) exceptional individuals shape history in important ways (e.g. Frederick Douglass) but the experiences of most people differ from those exceptional people (e.g. most African Americans in the 19th century).

The Challenges of the "Indian Problem" for Andrew Jackson... and for History Teachers

Update on August 19, 2019 - I just finished listening to episode #10 of the wonderful podcast, "Seeing White"from Scene on Radio by John Biewen. I can't begin to explain how thought-provoking this episode was. It was actually originally produced for This American Life. Called "Little War on the Prairie," it is about the Dakota War of 1862 in Minnesota and the memorial to the largest mass hanging in U.S. history and how it is remembered (or not remembered) today. It's a must: http://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-35-little-war-on-the-prairie-seeing-white-part-5/ 

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

— African proverb

There is nothing quite like the proverb above to bring to the forefront the "problem" of how to teach Indian history in a U.S. history course. The term, "the Indian Problem" is used to describe the difficulties faced by the U.S. goverment (inherited from the colonial era) in dealing with the conflicts between Native Americans on the one hand, and white Americans on the other, particularly on the frontier. But I have always had an "Indian Problem" of my own when trying to responsibly incorporate American Indian history into the U.S. history curriculum.

"Andrew Jackson as the Great Father"

Let us first be clear, that what I am talking about is how to fit Indians into the "mainstream" story of the political history of the United States. That's where we first see the irony of the above proverb. Most U.S. history teachers do not teach much, if anything, about Native Americans themselves. Neither the diversity of Indian groups, nor their individual cultures are typically examined. Even the fact that we refer to the people as "Indians" or "Native Americans" belies a Eurocentric approach. We only talk about specific peoples when they are in direct conflict with white Americans. The Pequot, the Seminole, the Creeks, the Cherokee, the Sioux, the Iroquois, the Sauk, the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne--all these names are familiar to us because they have been on the losing side of the long, painful story of Indians in the United States. And we usually teach these topics from the perspective of white Americans.

It may be instructive to compare the challenges of teaching about race and the place of African Americans in U.S. history to that of Native Americans. As a teacher and a student, the problem of slavery is, in a weird and ironic way, easier to wrestle with because we know that--no matter what problems still exist surrounding racial equality for blacks--at least slavery has been abolished. So even when we have to encounter the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow, we can feel better because we know that slavery will be abolished and legal segregation will end. But the story of Native Americans has a much different outcome. And the most challenging part, I think, is that even when students register emotions of empathy with Indians, and outrage over U.S. policy, none of them are advocating that Georgia "give back" land to the Cherokee. We are moved by Chief Joseph's poignant speech in which he says he will fight no more forever. But no one is suggesting the Pacific Northwest be returned to the Nez Perce.

So I find the proverb above somewhat discomfiting. There really is no way around the fact that the success of the United States resulted in the significant defeat and decimation of Native Americans. I am not leaping to the inaccurate conclusion that Indians do not still exist. Bringing the story up to the present is important. And, depending on where you live and who your students are, you may have Native Americans in your class. Those of us who live and work in communities with significant Indian populations will have unique issues to address. But I have found that even in the Chicago area where Indians are not nearly as visible as they were when I taught in Wisconsin, students still have questions about things like Indian-run casinos and reservations today.

So, keeping all of the above in mind, how would one go about teaching the history of Indian Removal and the policies of Andrew Jackson?

There are quite a few lesson plans and ideas out there in the internet. Some approaches try to get students to see things from the perspective of the Indians, some from the perspective of Jackson, some from both. I like to focus on the perspective of Jackson and conclude with looking at the effects from the perspective of the Indians, recognizing that my approach does put more emphasis on the perspective of the winners.

My operating premise for the lesson includes the following key ideas:

1. President Jackson's views must be understood in the context of the time in which he lived. 
2. Jackson's views were complicated. It is not simply a matter of being anti-Indian or sympathetic to Indians.
3. His choices were circumscribed by a variety of factors, leading to #4 below.
4. At the end of the day, the U.S. was in a position of making a bad choice for the Indians and a worse choice. In other words, given the 200 plus years of history preceding, there was not going to be an option that would be ideal for the Indians who were removed. 

Each of the four points above inform my approach, but I do not share these with students all at once, particularly the last two. The last two should be understood by students as a result of the lesson, not up front. And I admit, up front, that this lesson presents a definite point of view: that removal was Jackson's only viable choice. (I do NOT, however, try to argue that this was the morally correct choice.) Despite the flaws of this approach, I think it helps students understand a key point about history: that choices made in the past have consequences for the future. I like to emphasize that point at the end of the lesson.

This is how I have taught Indian removal (in one 80 minute lesson when I taught on a block, or 2 periods if not):

Part I: Students need some background information, which could take the form of a reading they do in advance, a reading in class, a brief lecture, or a film clip. Some of the things that should be included in this background are listed below. You could spend forever on these points, or 5-10 minutes. Opt for 5-10 minutes.

• background or reminders about previous white/Indian encounters - Blackhawk war, Seminole wars, and in general what has happened to Indians in North America?
• westward expansion, particularly in the South after the invention of the cotton gin. (I once employed a little "fun and games" at the beginning of class, using a "mystery box." Students had 20 questions to ask to figure out what was in the box (a ball of cotton with seeds). Their only clue was it had something to do with a lesson from earlier in the week that connected to today's lesson on Indian Removal). Trying to figure out the connection was a good "aha" moment for students.
• background on Andrew Jackson's previous encounters with Indians, e.g. Seminole wars
• background on the situation in Georgia with the Cherokee.

Part II: Go over 4 options that Jackson had for dealing with the problem with the Cherokee in Georgia. Again, this can be done briefly--5-10 minutes. Or can be handled with a brief handout given in advance; perhaps students come into class already having picked one? Or can have brief descriptions that students read in class. Another alternative that I have not tried, would be to simply put students into groups and see if they could come up with options on their own. 

1. Assimilation of Indians into white society: the federal government could commit to a policy of integrating Indians into white society. Setting up schools, breaking up tribal arrangements, etc. (This, of course, will become a later policy in the 1880s).
2. Destruction of Indians: This option could take one of two forms. One, some Americans clearly supported outright war with Indians and saw deliberate extermination of the Indian population as a viable option. But destruction could also result from a policy of not doing anything. If the state or federal government did nothing, aggressive white settlers might take matters into their own hands. If there are 100,000 Indians and 13 million white settlers....
3. Protection: The federal government could send the military to protect Indians on their land against white settlers. (At some point, you might want to mention to students what was going on in South Carolina with the nullifcation/tariff issue and why Jackson would not want to try this approach at this time. This raises another key point about history: sometimes certain choices are not viable because of unrelated issues that are going on at the same time. The great example of this, of course, is what might have happened to Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" and the Civil Rights Movement had the nation not been faced with Vietnam at the same time.)
4. Removal: Move the Indians onto land that was not wanted by white settlers.

Part III: Students choose which option they think Jackson should choose. This can be done either by having students physically get up and go to a corner of the room representing their choice (label each corner with a sheet of paper).  Or students can get up and post a sticky note with their name on it on one of 4 pieces of paper labeled with the choice (either in a corner or on the board at the front). Either way, students get to stand up and move around for a second. 

And here again, you have choices. Students can spend time with others who agree, and come up with some arguments. You can divide groups into subgroups. In their groups, students can first discuss with each other the rationale for their decision. You could also give students some of the primary sources given below to work with during this part of the lesson, asking them to use the documents as support for their position, or to come up with arguments against the ones in the documents. (See the links from Digital History, below).

You can, and probably should, lead a whole class discussion. Whatever you decide, I think it's important to emphasize some of the lessons of history I have highlighted above.  For example, if protecting the Indians in Georgia meant risking rebellion of the state of Georgia against the United States (thinking about the nullification crisis in South Carolina), how would that influence Jackson's decision. You could also discuss whether or not the thesis I have proposed is accurate: was the option that Jackson actually chose a choice between "a bad choice and a worse choice?" And when we--students today--evaluate this decision, do we evaluate it in the context of the times, or with the knowledge of the aftermath (Part IV below) or the morality?

Part IV: I don't think you should ever teach a lesson on Indian removal without providing students with the perspectives of those who experienced it. You will find excellent resources that describe what the Trail of Tears was like at the Digital History website (more from this website below). You can find another good account from the Cherokee perspective at the very last page of this pdf lesson (there are some other good ideas and resources, but the beginning of the lesson asks students to think about what home means to them and what they would take with them if they had to suddenly leave and that really rubs me the wrong way, as I explained at the beginning of this earlier post.) And you might--depending on how you time everything--try to put this part of the lesson in before you discuss some of the issues I mentioned in Part III, above.

And one final thought....I've always liked to use this quotation, attributed to a colonel from Georgia (sorry I can't find the source):

"I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands. But the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."

I might use this quotation as a conclusion and ask students whether or not anything could have been done to prevent this tragedy. It occurs to me that while there may be a depressing inevitability about the decision to remove the Cherokee, the way it was handled-- the Trail of Tears--was not inevitable. And so even if Jackson was caught between a rock and a hard place, his way out might have been handled with greater attention to the way in which that removal was carried out.  

Below are some additional resources:

• Listen to the segment about the Trail of Tears in a recent podcast from BackStory Radio with the American History Guys.  In it, Jackson's removal policy is discussed in the context of the history of American interventions for humanitarian purposes. It considers the fact that Jackson himself thought he was doing the right thing in order to save the Indians. Jackson was well aware that many of the Indians that were not removed (i.e. from the Northeast) no longer existed. Daniel Feller, a historian and Andrew Jackson scholar at the University of Tennessee makes the intriguing point that humanitarianism is in the eye of the beholder. He says, "One person's humanitarianism is another's cultural genocide." What an interesting perspective to revisit when you teach about the reservation schools and the policies of the 1880s!
• See the Digital History Project for additional primary sources and teaching activities related to Indian Removal. They include some excellent political cartoons (including the one below), excerpts from Jackson's speeches about his policy, and a letter from Cherokee Chief John Ross. There are also other pages that will direct you to resources on past Indian policies of Jefferson, Monroe, and how the Cherokees were quite acculturated to American society. Also, see here for their "teacher-ready" excerpt to use with students that includes 4 short documents (1 from Jackson, 1 from Cherokees, 1 from John Marshall's Supreme Court decision and 1 from the governor of Georgia). Using some of these resources in Part III of the lesson I have suggested above will make your lesson longer, but richer.

• I am quite aware that most of my above lesson ideas revolve around the perspective of whites and the U.S. government. For more information about how the Cherokees responded, click here for the Digital History's collection about resistance to removal from the Cherokees.
• Other lesson ideas and resources can be found here.

• Worried that you are not using the Common Core standards? Worry no more: standards numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 can all be easily incorporated into this lesson. (The link I've included is to the 9-10th grade standards, but similar ones exist for 6-8th grades and 11-12th).

Here are a few books that might be useful. I have not read the first three, but decided to go ahead and list them anyway:

• Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History - a short (216 pages) book that you can get on kindle for $10.
• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States - a more comprehensive book.
• And one book that unfortunately isn't out yet: Susan Sleeper-Smith and Juliana Barr, editors, Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians. (May 2015)

And ones that I have read:

• The chapter on Indian Removal in Robert V. Remini's, The Jacksonian Era in the American History Series is very good. (So is the whole book: a nice, brief, readable account of the Jacksonian Era. And available used on Amazon).
• From the same as the above series, check out Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1820-1890.

Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ebola and U.S. History

I caught just a few minutes this morning of Terry Gross on Fresh Air interviewing Helene Cooper, who is a Liberian-born American journalist (currently Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times.) And immediately I remembered my recent post on slavery, and that I neglected an opportunity to bring in current events.

The current news about Ebola in West Africa offers an opportunity to teach students a

little something about the history of Liberia, Sierra Leone and the American Colonization Society.

The Liberian flag bears a striking resemblance to our own.

And the Liberian capital, Monrovia, was named after James Monroe, who supported the colonization of Liberia. And "Liberia" comes from "Liberty." And it was settled by a group of former American slaves and aided by the American Colonization Society.

It is unfortunate that it takes a terrible epidemic to remind me about this important connection. Ebola or no ebola, we ought to familiarize our students with Liberia and Sierra Leone. Whenever I taught about the American Colonization Society in the past, I did at least mention these facts above. And students were really amazed and surprised that they had never heard this before. Discussing the American Colonization Society opens up a Pandora's box of questions about race in America. It is always eye-opening, if uncomfortable, for students to recognize that white abolitionists might be opposed to slavery for racist reasons.


For more information, check out the websites below.  The Library of Congress, especially, has some good resources.

• a brief History of Liberia which then links to primary sources about colonization and Liberia from the Library of Congress.
• Did you know that before the Civil War, Robert E. Lee freed most of his slaves and offered to pay to send them to Liberia? Neither did I! Read more about that here (includes other primary sources about Liberia.)
• The Gilder Lehrman's Institute of American History has information on the American Colonization Society. (You need to be a member in order to take full advantage of the discussion questions on this link. Membership is free to teachers, and if you've never visited this website, it is worth signing up and checking it out. Learn more about what they do by clicking here.)
• PBS overview of Liberia and the U.S.
• Article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about Paul Cuffee and colonization in Africa.
• At history.com you can read a bit about the first organized immigration of freed slaves.
• Check out this article from the New York Times, Feb 1862 about the recognition of Haiti and Liberia.

The Market Revolution: Moving towards an Industrial Economy

As I was going through my files for my unit on the New Republic, I found this handy little lesson on the changes from the colonial economy to an early industrial economy. Economics is not my strong suit, but it is important for students to understand broad strokes in the economy and see how the United States moved from a primarily agricultural nation to the one we are today. The lesson described below is the first step.

What I like about this classroom activity is its simplicity and that it gives students the opportunity to literally manipulate data. I have been continually surprised by how well the very low-tech technique of changing the format of information away from 81/2 X 11 sheets of paper onto small cards works. I suppose one could turn it into some kind of app, but I suspect that for today's youth, they might find index cards novel and the ipad...well, less so. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for my old lesson plans.

I'm pretty sure I got the idea for this lesson after reading Charles Seller's The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 in grad school. But I also might have gotten some of it from one of my colleagues, or adapted it from another lesson plan.

So here is the main activity of the lesson:

(Ideally you would need some sort of introduction.) I'm constantly haranguing my student teachers that all good lessons should have a beginning, a middle and an end. This is just the middle.)

Copy the chart below onto cardstock. You will need one for each group or pair of students. Small groups or pairs are best. Cut up all the cards and stick each set (mix 'em up) in an envelope.

Have the students first find the cards that say "Colonial Economy" and "Market Economy" and put those at the top. Then have them sort all the cards into one pile for colonial, one for market. They will find it easiest if they FIRST find pairs (e.g. find both national wealth cards). Do one or two with them as an example if you like. This should work well with middle or high school students.  You can eliminate some of the cards if you have less time.

Here's the first page of the chart (you can click here for a google doc version that has BOTH pages):

Then, depending on timing, you can either go over it as a class, or check their pairs and columns as they work. You can have them either write up a paragraph summarizing the main difference, using a few specific examples. Or ask them to write ONE good sentence that makes an overall generalization. You could also have students transferring them to an organizer like this one as an activity before writing any of the above ideas. Alternatively, you can have a brief discussion about the effects on individuals, families and communities (e.g. values, lifestyles, customs, daily life).

I like to conclude by reminding students about the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson. Do the changes in the economy seem more Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian? And then you can refer to Jefferson's famous comments about manufacturing vs. agriculture from his Notes on the State of Virginia. 

"Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people...."

and

"Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

You can find the complete text here.


Other resources:

• If you haven't already found them, you should check out John Green's Crash Courses on YouTube. They move pretty fast: there is A LOT of content crammed into videos of 10-15 minutes in length. Because of that, they are probably more suitable to high school level, but you can show parts of them and that would work for middle schoolers. His YouTube video below on the Market Revolution could be used as an intro or conclusion to this lesson. In the 8th minute, Green goes on to explain the connection of the market revolution to other historical trends, such as westward expansion, manifest destiny, immigration, women's work and the "dehuminization" that occurs as a result of industrialization. He concludes with an interesting point about Herman Melville's famous story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," which would be an interesting tie-in to literature. But you could also just show the first 8 minutes of this video, if you wanted to keep your lesson more focused on the market economy. (However, you could also include your lesson with a really interesting philosophical discussion of the implications of industrialization.)

• Crash Course also has a video about the invention of the railroad from their World History videos.  
• I found the above video from a post on a very useful blog, Freetech4teachers. The author of this award-winning blog used to teach social studies, so lots of the tech stuff is geared towards the social studies. Check out this post on railroads that has links to some other really neat websites, including historypin.org and a video that shows the growth of the railroads.
• I used to use this lesson along with a brief reading about the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. I'm not sure what I used, but there are quite a few (an understatement) resources to be found at University of Massachusetts Center for Lowell History including this interactive activity and letters from mill girls.

Teaching about slavery BEFORE the Missouri Compromise

Scroll to the bottom of this post for some new resources that are available since I wrote this post.

I do not have any specific data on this, but I would bet a lot of money that if you went into middle and high school classrooms and asked students about slavery in the North, you would get a lot of blank stares. I would also bet that many history teachers (based on what I know about most history textbooks) teach very little about slavery until they get to the pre-Civil War period. Maybe a mention or two about the 3/5 compromise or the decision to end the slave trade in 1808. Hopefully a bit more about the beginning of slavery during the colonial period.

But for the most part, when Americans think about slavery, they think about big plantations, cotton, the South and the Civil War.

Middle school level textbooks do an especially poor job on this.  High school level books probably are a bit better, but I don't have any handy to check.

Consider the few mentions in my daughter's 7th grade U.S. history textbook (Pearson's Prentice Hall America: History of Our Nation):

During the Revolution, a number of northern states took steps to end slavery.  For example, a Pennsylvania law of 1780 provided for a gradual end to slavery.  It allowed slaveholders to keep their existing slaves but barred them from getting more. (p. 187)

There is another sentence about the North on page 395:

 Slavery had largely ended in the North by the early 1800s.

And 27 pages later, a brief section with a bolded beginning:

Slavery Ends in the North In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law that gradually eliminated slavery.  By 1804, every northern state had ended or pledged to end slavery.  Congress also outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory.  As a result, when Ohio entered the Union in 1803, it became the first state to ban slavery in its state constitution.

And on page 400, there are 4 sentences on the Nat Turner rebellion that simply state what happened, without any explanation of the significance.

Slavery is one of The Issues of the first half of U.S. history, and I believe we must teach it more comprehensively, throughout our units on Colonial America, the Constitution, the New Nation and the period leading up to the Civil War (not to mention the after effects during Reconstruction through the present, but that gets us into next semester). Students need to understand that big cotton plantations did not magically appear in the South. Historian Ira Berlin explains, "viewing Southern slavery from the point of maturity...[has] produced an essentially static vision of slave culture." (From "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," American Historical Review, 85, Feb. 1980.)  Students walk away with a myopic look at slavery if we only teach about it right before the Civil War.

So, what should students learn about slavery before you get to the Missouri Compromise? An incomplete list follows. I was trying to make this more complete, then remembered this is a blog, not a book. If I put everything here, I'd never finish this post!

• First off, see my earlier post about slavery in the colonial period.

• When we teach about the Constitution, we need students to read the excerpts on the 3/5 compromise and the end of the slave trade. But more importantly, we need them to understand how this almost derailed the Constitutional Convention. See here for a brief history. See about midway through the page for more info here. And a few other links: click here or here. Students should understand that from the beginning, the United States was struggling over slavery.

And now, moving on to the post-revolutionary era:

• Students should be reminded that slavery did exist in the North. Use maps to illustrate this: http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US08-00.html (I couldn't get this to open, but hopefully you can.) But also check out this really cool map and this one that I found on what looks to be a really interesting Civil War blog--called Civil War Memory by Kevin M. Levin that I will have to check out later. (Now you know why it takes me forever to get these blog posts done...I find all kinds of other fun stuff and before I know it hours go by....) He does a nice job of explaining what he does with students to help them understand slavery as a national, not just southern, phenomenon.

• Cotton, of course, did become king. So teach students about how that happened. Click here for background info about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.  

Want to use Common Core standards?

• Using the standards below, have students read a brief account of the significance of the cotton gin, either in their textbook, something you write up, or use this account (scroll down to "Effects") from the National Archives website.  (Note: you can also find links to teaching activities and documents about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.)

Then, to implement the above standard, students can examine maps like these interactive ones from the University of Oregon which shows the spread of slavery from 1790-1860. There are 3 of them that show the growth of cotton, slavery and then combining them. Plus there's a graph displaying the economics of cotton.

• Nat Turner!! I am currently reading Stephen B. Oates's book, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion. The final chapter (I read ahead) is about the legacy of Turner's Rebellion and it is excellent. I am reading the book because I read a fantastic lesson plan by Bruce Lesh in his book, Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answers about Nat Turner. It appears that you can see this lesson online but buy his book! There are lots of other great lesson ideas in it! I think it is important to teach Nat Turner and the debates over slavery in Virginia that followed because of this paragraph I once read by the historian Gerda Lerner.

Some other interesting resources:

• Check out the fourth paragraph of George Washington's will (link to the will on this webpage) in which he requests that all his slaves be freed following his death and that of his wife. Lots more information about Washington and slavery at the Mount Vernon website: click here. Also check out this PBS lesson plan about Washington and slavery. 2015 update about this link: I can't seem to find this anymore. Sorry!

• Some intriguing information can be found about Robert Carter III, who gradually freed over 500 slaves, the largest manumission of slaves by a single person before the Civil War. Check it out at the website nominihallslavelegacy.com. You can get a brief bio of Carter, primary sources and a list of all the enslaved people that were freed by name. (Interesting note--I just fixed this link on August 18. The reason it wasn't working is because the old link was: http://nominihallslavelegacy.com/slaves/ and the last word, "slaves" has been changed to "enslaved." Thinking about the words we use (slaves vs. enslaved) matters and can be a thoughtful exercise with students. For more on this, see a recent blogpost I did for Middleweb.)

• Do check out this website devoted to the abolition of the slave trade from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It has incredible resources, including this little blurb about the significance of the American Revolution and a timeline.

• One of my favorite podcasts, BackStory with the American History Guys did an episode on the War of 1812 (worth checking out in its entirety). In one segment, historian Peter Onuf discusses a little known verse of our national anthem that touches on fears about slavery developing at this time. You can hear that segment here or read the brief transcript (scroll to the segment, "Facetime").

• Check out slavevoyages.org for a database of slave voyages.

• Check out the Digital Library on American Slavery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

• There are a whole bunch of resources available from PBS in connection with their broadcast, Slavery and the Making of America. There are links to primary sources and other readings, lesson plans for middle and high school levels, and virtual exhibits created by students.  Unfortunately, the link for Lesson 5 (Slavery by the Numbers) to the required census data seems to be broken, but I think I found it here.

• See this review in the New York Times as well as Eric Foner's review of Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of Capitalism.  (Obviously, the book itself would be an excellent source, too, but at 500 plus pages, that's something to check out over winter break or the summer!) The reviews at least give you some brief insight about the tremendous economic impact of slavery. And this review distills 5 basic arguments from the book.

• When you get to the Missouri Compromise, don't forget to use one of my favorite quotations from Thomas Jefferson. It explains volumes about the predicament of the South and the nation regarding slavery. His image of grabbing a wolf by the ear will help middle schoolers wrestle with the complexity of the situation. Check out this lesson plan from PBS on the topic.

• Slavery is intimately connected to America's continual struggle with race. For ideas about connecting contemporary racial issues to slavery, look into the The Race Card Project by Michelle Norris (from National Public Radio).  National Public Radio has turned some of these into longer stories. The most recent one delves into slavery as the fundamental cause of the Civil War. Find it here.

History's reach is very long. The ripple effect of slavery still has the power to make students uncomfortable nearly two hundred years later. Of course we can't ignore what is depressing. Sadly, so much of history is. It is critical that we remember who we are teaching: while we are not only our ethnic/racial identities, those identities do inform our perceptions. And when we teach about tragic things--slavery, war, oppression & discrimination, U.S. treatment of minorities, etc.--it behooves us to consider the perspectives of those we teach as well as our own.
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Update on August 18, 2019 - the best new resource since I published this post is Teaching Tolerance's, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. There are outstanding resources and podcasts to help you along.
Also, (what made me update this post) is the publication of a New York Times special series in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ship to Virginia in 1619. Called the 1619 project, you can read about it here.
And two other readings, good for teacher background: Ta-Nehisi Coates's seminal essay about reparations and the chapter 1 on "Race" in American Dialogue: The Founders and Us by Joseph J. Ellis.

Looking through the Trick-or-Treat bag for History:

Ideas for Teaching about Halloween

I never realized that there was history, close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

— Stephen Leacock

In my work with student teachers, there are two days that I will never observe them teach: the Friday before spring break and Halloween. No teacher wants to be evaluated on those days.

And this year, Halloween falls on a Friday. Of course, there is no reason why you cannot go about your business and teach whatever topic you are on. As I mentioned in my last post, I meant my next post to be about slavery. But then I got thinking about Halloween and the quotation above, and I thought, why not teach something about the history of Halloween next Friday? I like the idea of getting students to see that history is all around them. Even at the bottom of the trick-or-treat bag.

I live just outside Chicago within biking distance of one of the Mars Candy Co. headquarters and Ferrara Pan Co. factory (maker of Lemonheads, Redhots and Jugyfruits among others). The Chicago area is also home to Blommer's Chocolate Factory, which (according to their website) is the largest cocoa processor and chocolate supplier in North America. You can smell the chocolate up to a mile away depending on the direction of the wind. Very Willy Wonka-esque.

When I drive on I-294, I go past the rotating Baby Ruth/Butterfinger sign. And I love to see the Wrigley building on the Chicago River when it’s lit up at night. Yes, that Wrigley. Chicago used to be the candy capital of America. At one time it produced up to a third of all the candy in the country, as I learned two years ago at a wonderful little exhibit at the Elmhurst Historical Museum (if you’re in the Chicago area, check out their website. It says you can contact the curator for a traveling version of the exhibition).  


But even if you live nowhere near a candy factory, you can still teach a lesson about candy and Halloween.  Halloween is the second largest commercial holiday in the country, and I read somewhere that we spend an estimated six billion dollars on it. Of course, Halloween was not always such a big deal. Neither was Christmas, for that matter. I remember being surprised when I first learned that Puritans in colonial New England had banned the celebration of Christmas.

Teaching students about how the holiday of Halloween has evolved offers opportunities to see that history is everywhere; that our celebrations of holidays changes over time and is impacted by other changes in society.

For example, both Christmas and Halloween have been profoundly affected by immigration. The tradition of Christmas trees came from German immigrants and carving pumpkins may have evolved from an Irish tradition of carving turnips into lanterns during an Irish festival marking the end of the harvest. (See here.) Candy-making, too, was influenced by immigration. (See below for more info).

So below are some additional websites I have found that are useful for pulling together a lesson on either Halloween or candy or both. What would you do with them? Well, I have also recently been looking into the concept of Genius Hour. While the whole point of genius hour is to let students explore what interests them, not to predetermine the topic, I think you could still adapt the idea by giving them the predetermined topic.

Here is a link to a post that describes doing something like that in a Civil War unit in a middle school setting. (This is Project Based Learning or PBL. Find out more about that here.) Perhaps you could adapt this to Halloween for a day and ask students one big question and then let them go to town trying to find answers and information. So maybe--it's Halloween Friday, so why not?--just have students look through some of the websites I have listed below and see what they come up with about one of the questions below:

How has the holiday of Halloween changed over time and why?

What can we learn about history from the history of candy?

Or perhaps you can eliminate the question and have the students come up with a good, historical question. (Admittedly, teaching students how to ask historical questions is something that you really have to train students how to do in advance. Maybe this could be your first lesson in a series of lessons teaching about how to ask good questions.) So maybe you could try something really basic: Find one fun or cool fact to share with the class and one "interesting" question (as opposed to historical--just see what they come up with. Just make sure it's not a factual-type question. Find some way for students to post this online or share. 

Just one suggestion: do NOT make any of this a homework assignment over the Halloween weekend!

• Edsitement's website has a page about Halloween and other similar festivals around the world. It includes information about the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, along with other festivals (If you have a significant Hispanic population at your school, it would be interesting to compare and contrast the two. I was in Mexico City last October, just before Day of the Dead and was surprised at the markets to find so many more decorations for American-style Halloween than traditional sugar skulls and Mexican decorations!) The website also contains lesson ideas and links to the American Memory Project's documents about Halloween. (If you've never been to the American Memory Project, it is an essential website. Check it out!)
• The History Channel has a brief history.
• I missed this exhibit at the University of Chicago, but it's online now. There are quite a few images and a page on the history of chocolate and candymaking in Chicago.
• See "Halloween by the Numbers," where you can find statistics from the U.S. census.
• See this "flashback" article from the Chicago Tribune about the role of immigrants and Chicago in the history of candy. This book is for those of you who live in Chicago and want to learn more.
• An article from the Huffington Post about Chicago and candymaking.
• This article from Forbes discusses current economics/business news related to the holiday.
• This article from the Smithsonian's website discusses the history of candy, Halloween and the surprising relationship between candy and medicine.
• Candyfavorites.com is an online store, but has surprisingly good (and fun!) historic resources, including a timeline, a list of discontinued candy, a history overview, and lots of nostalgic candy ads and old TV commercials. Check out their candy timeline.
• And last, but certainly not least, check out this blog I just found called History Spaces. I found it when googling the history of the Baby Ruth candy bar. (Shorter article on the Baby Ruth candy bar here.) Great stories at this blog about all kind of really random things and useful for teaching the idea that history is everywhere.

Ben Bradlee, Freedom of the Press and the Digital Age

Last night's passing of Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post got me thinking about my favorite quotes from Thomas Jefferson about the importance of a free press.  Bradlee's leadership of the Post resulted in Watergate and the downfall of a president. But as the Post points out in their obituary of Bradlee, he was also responsible for deciding to print the Pentagon Papers--the Pentagon's history of the Vietnam War. (Click here for National Archives links to the papers, here for link to History Channel info about them.) It was that decision, Bradlee claimed, that paved the way for his decision to pursue the Watergate story. (see quote in abc's obituary).

Of course, we all know that newspapers have been "dying" for years now. But separating out "journalism" from "newspapers" and considering the role of the press in a digital age could be a really cool subject to study with kids. This morning, over my morning coffee, I found some materials that may be useful for this. They are very "rough draft" sort of materials, but this is, after all, a blog not a book, so I'm putting it out there. Hope you can find something interesting to do with this. I think it would work well in a lesson on the first amendment, on Thomas Jefferson, on Vietnam and the role of the press, or almost anywhere in the U.S. history curriculum, as the importance of freedom of the press to a vibrant democracy is a theme woven throughout our history.  Or try it in your government/civics class if you teach that.  And, as I discussed in yesterday's post, this could be a way to make the 1789-1830s period more engaging for students.

Potential sources to use with students:

• documents to use with students - this is a link to a document I created that includes the Thomas Jefferson quotes about the importance of a free press and education as well as Justice Black's opinion in the Supreme Court case about the Pentagon Papers. I think you could use them as a DBQ type of exercise: perhaps create some overall question about the importance of a free press that uses the documents as support? Or just discuss with students in light of some of the resources below? Please use the comments to share any ideas you have! I also included in there a quotation from an article by in the The New Republic by Paul Starr, Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at Princeton. The last line of the article is a great continuation of Jefferson's view. He writes, "Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities." What a fun thing to discuss with students-- middle school or high school students! The link to the complete article (which is good background for teachers is here. And an interesting critique to the article by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Library and Information Studies Greg Downey can be found here.)

• from Wikipedia, List of Defunct Newspapers of the United States

• Check out this story, Why the press matters: 6 recent stories of civic impact from journalistsresource.org, a website produced by the Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. (I just found this website this morning, but it looks like a great resource for other topics, too. Read more about it here.) 

• Consider a discussion or study of materials about how blogs, twitter and other online media have changed politics in the United States. Here is a link to Ben Smith from BuzzFeed discussing Twitter and other news models.

• A Google search I did using the terms "importance of journalism" led me to this website I have never seen:  threesixtyjournalism.org--an online journalism website for teens that also has some curriculum materials for teachers (click here for those; no idea if it's any good, but a quick look seemed promising).

• This article, reminded me that the Newseum is a good resource. Obviously if you live in the D.C. area, you could go there with or without students, but they have some interesting resources online. Check them out at: newseum.org/education

• Think about the election of 1960 between Kennedy and Nixon and the famous television debate in which Nixon sounded better (to those listening to the debate on radio) but Kennedy looked better on television. Discuss with students the role of changing media on the electoral process. Compare this to the recent elections of 2008 and 2012 and the role of the internet. I found this online course which gives a very good overview of the media and its impact on democracy. Discusses everything from Hamilton and Jefferson, to the yellow journalism that led to the Spanish-American war to F.D.R.'s use of the radio in his fireside chats to the new role of television and the internet in a few pages that would either work for high school students or as background info for teachers. It's really worth checking out.

• Tons of other stuff out there about the use of social media in politics. These two articles are the tip of the iceberg on that. The first is post election 2012: How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media and this one is post election 2008: How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. You can probably find some more recent articles that touch on the same topic.
• Need some international newspapers? Thank you to one of my readers for sending in this link: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/complete-index-of-newspapers-across-the-globe/