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Create a Magic Lantern Show: Freedpeople in the Reconstruction South
In this activity students create a "magic lantern show," or presentation that illustrates how African American defined freedom for themselves after emancipation and the challenges and threats they faced. Students use primary sources from the [...]
Slavery: Acts of Resistance
In this activity students compare an excerpt of a WPA interview with an ex-slave with a more famous statement by Frederick Douglass to arrive at their own interpretations of slave resistance. This lesson is designed to work with the film Doing As [...]
Running for Freedom: The Fugitive Slave Law and the Coming of the Civil War
This activity compares a runaway slave ad and an abolitionist poster to explore the causes and effects of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. The law changed how many northerners viewed slavery and intensified conflicts that brought the nation closer to [...]
What This Cruel War Was Over: Slavery and the Civil War
In this activity students will examine how attitudes towards slavery and the Civil War changed between 1860 and 1865. What began in the minds of President Lincoln and most northerners as a war to preserve the union changed, over the course of the [...]
Forty Acres? The Question of Land at the War's End
In this activity students consider different viewpoints on whether former slaves should be given land at the end of the Civil War. Students read one of five primary sources and summarize the author's viewpoint. This activity makes a good [...]
Who Freed the Slaves During the Civil War?
In this activity students analyze visual and textual evidence about "contraband" enslaved African Americans during the Civil War era. They compare the roles of African Americans, the Union military, and the policies of the Republican party in [...]
Gender, Sex, and Slavery
In this activity students read about slavery's effect on women from the perspectives of an enslaved woman and a plantation mistress. Then students create a dialogue between the two women.