1 Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction
This unit has the most choices because it is the first unit, because there are so many ways to teach this revolutionary period and set of events, and because the University of Maryland has made so many excellent primary sources available.
Primary Source Text: Example of Union soldier letter on slavery: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2012/10/a-letter-home/
Primary Source Text: Emancipation Proclamation and related texts: https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation
Primary Source Text: Union generals discuss emancipation as military tactic:http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Halleck.html
Primary Source Text: The process of emancipation driven by contrabands:http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/wilder.htm
Primary Source Text: Black corporal demanding equal pay in letter to Lincoln: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/gooding.htm
Primary Source Text: Story of a Black soldier who escaped from slavery and hid in the swamps for a year before finding the Union Army: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/OJohnson.html
Primary Source Text: Report of expedition to free enslaved people in Virginia: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Wild.html
Primary Source Text: Black residents of Nashville demanding rights at Unionist convention of Tennessee, 1865: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/tenncon.htm
Primary Source Text: Freedman Bayley Wyatt articulating former slave’s right ot the land: http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Wyat.html
Primary Source Text: Henry Blake describes sharecropping: https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6377/
Primary Source Text: Freedpeople’s testimony on KKK violence: https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/after_slavery_educator/unit_nine_documents/document_9
Primary Source Text: Congressman Richard Harvey Cain, 1874 speech on Civil Rights Act, beginnings of segregation: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1874-richard-harvey-cain-all-we-ask-equal-laws-equal-legislation-and-equal-rights/
Hollywood movie: Glory, 1989, could be used to introduce a critical reading of film through an examination of the white savior trope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny8KGUqTNkM
Hollywood Movie: Free State of Jones, 2016, true story of interracial resistance to Confederacy and Redemption in Louisiana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOZ_1BdSfEA
