The Quest for Equality: Transforming the History classroom with Primary Sources and Public history

Robyn C. SpencerAssistant Professor of HistoryLehman College

Project Overview: What to expect.Introductions

What will we learn and how will we learn it?

How will we translate the new knowledge/approaches learned into new teaching practices?

Thinking Like a Historian

Historiography

Primary Sources

Public History

The Quest for Equality

• Reconstruction▫Emancipation v. Freedom▫Emergence of Jim Crow

• Civil Rights▫African Americans▫Women

• Immigrants▫Early Settlement of America▫Voluntary/involuntary immigration▫Legislation

Engaging Students•Centering students

in the classroom as active learners

•Improving content knowledge

•Teaching historical habits of mind

•Enhancing critical thinking

•Fueling Interest and Passion in the Past

Content overview: The Present Past

Where will we start our historical exploration?

What is the backhistory?

How do the themes of this project relate to each other?

The Quest for Equality

•What does equality mean in different historical time periods?

African Slave Trade1440-1867

Free

Half Free

Indentured Servant

Slave

How was labor organized in Early America 1612-1660?

Labor, Race and Servitude in the Chesapeake

• 1612 –20 Africans Arrive in Jamestown

• 1620s-1660s—Indentured Servitude

• Race and the Origins of Black Slavery

• How? Why? When?

•1640 John Punch case-lifetime servitude

•1662 Slave status inherited

Thomas Jefferson--

• 1776 “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence)

• 1820“ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the

best man on the farm…..what she produces in an addition to capital.”(Farm Book, 45-46)

The Abolitionist Movement

•13th Amendment (1865) •Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) Act 1865

•14th Amendment 1868•15th Amendment 1870•Civil Rights Act of 1875

Major Legislation Passed During Reconstruction, 1865-1877

Backlash--Redemption

Looking Ahead

Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond