Two examples of indenture contracts and three accounts of indentured servitude, including positive as well as admonitory views, in the Chesapeake English colonies.
Thirty primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore motivations, visions, patterns, goals, challenges, and relationships with indigenous peoples offered by Europeans in their settlement of the New World.
An eighteenth-century map, several illustrations by Europeans of Africans from Sierra Leone, and two eighteenth-century narratives depicting Sierra Leone natives through the eyes of two British physicians who describe the peoples they encounter and who advocate for the abolition of slavery.
This resource provides nineteenth-century black narratives that address what it meant to be enslaved and how slaves' identity was formed and changed over time.
A West African map and three accounts of the development of slave acquisition display the process and the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade.
Six poems written by navigators and included by George Peckham, and Richard Hakluyt's argument to promote British settlement in North America. Both documents were directed to Queen Elizabeth I in an effort to promote British involvement in New World discovery and trade.
Three maps reflecting French exploration along rivers in North America and three French explorers' accounts of the astonishing hardships they endured and the possibilities for trade with natives they opened.
Nine primary source resources describing the way people thought about progress during the Gilded Age, 1870-1912. Includes guided reading, links to supplemental material, and timeline.
Eighty-two primary sources explore African American identity in the 20th century. They examine segregation, migrations, protest, community, and what remained to be overcome.
Primary source material on the how enslaved Africans envisioned and pursued freedom and how these ideas affected them after the Civil War.
Congressional testimony and a letter that explore late nineteenth-century black migration from the South. Links to both resources are provided within this site.
Uses primary resources-historical documents, literary texts, visual images, audio, and video material-to explore how African Americans created group and individual identities in the late-nineteenth century. Topics include freedom, identity, institutions, and forward.
Hamlin Garland's short story, "The Return of a Private", that describes the post-Civil War conflicts for western farmers with nature and with other settlers.
Four nineteenth-century landscape paintings that suggest the meaning of the West in American life.
A collection of nine primary resources including historical documents, literary texts, visual images, and maps illuminated and contextualized by notes, thematic questions, and text-specific discussion questions for classroom instruction and teacher professional development.
A collection of twelve primary resources, primarily from American literature, that addresses questions about how the United States could function as a democracy, and differences between the concepts of the North and the South concerning that question.
Two poems that explore the struggles of African Americans in the early-twentieth century. Links to both poems by Fenton Johnson are provided, and illustrate the struggles experienced as black man in white America in the 1910s
The efforts to secure African American voting rights in Mississippi are described within this resource. Anne Moody's, "Coming of Age in Mississippi", a four-part memoir recounts her childhood and young adulthood in racist rural Mississippi.
Arguments by women for and against the extension of the vote to women. This resource primarily focuses on, "If Men Were Seeking the Franchise," by Jane Addams, used to project domestic values upon government and the state.
Letters by African Americans seeking help to leave the South. They explore issues including identity, family, community, and the struggles induced by the need to migrate north.