Lesson Plan Free Black Resistance in the Early Republic, 1813 and 1833 9, 10, 11, 12 Click here to access this lesson plan.
Spotlight on: Primary Source Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, 1770 Art, World History 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors began to pelt...
Spotlight on: Primary Source George Washington on the abolition of slavery, 1786 Economics, Government and Civics 9 Of the nine presidents who were slaveholders, only George Washington freed all his own slaves upon his death. Before the Revolution, Washington, like most White Americans, took slavery for granted. At the time of the Revolution, one...
Spotlight on: Primary Source John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841 Government and Civics On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad . They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards...
Spotlight on: Primary Source John Brown’s final speech, 1859 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ On Sunday evening, October 16, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown led a party of twenty-one men into the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intention of seizing the federal arsenal there. Encountering no resistance, Brown’s...
Spotlight on: Primary Source The Western Sanitary Commission reports on suffering in the Mississippi Valley, 1863 Government and Civics 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 In 1863 in the war-torn South, thousands were homeless and starving. Some of those most in need of aid were newly liberated enslaved people. The Western Sanitary Commission was organized on September 5, 1861, by General John C....
Spotlight on: Primary Source Sharecropper contract, 1867 Economics, Government and Civics 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ Immediately after the Civil War, many former slaves established subsistence farms on land that had been abandoned by fleeing white Southerners. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and a former slaveholder, soon restored this land to...
Spotlight on: Primary Source FDR on racial discrimination, 1942 Government and Civics 9 On June 25, 1941, almost six months before the United States’ entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination by government defense contractors. The...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Robert Kennedy on civil rights, 1963 Government and Civics 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13+ At the end of 1962, President John F. Kennedy asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to compile a report on the Civil Rights enforcement activities of the Justice Department over the previous year. In this report,...
Spotlight on: Primary Source Civil rights posters, 1968 Government and Civics Memphis sanitation workers, the majority of them African American, went out on strike on February 12, 1968, demanding recognition for their union, better wages, and safer working conditions after two trash handlers were killed by a...