Four accounts of the visits to and growth of colonial cities in Spanish, British, and French New World settlements that demonstrate why certain communities developed successfully.
Discusses the efforts of African Americans to be recognized as equal citizens after the Civil War, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Includes links to supplemental information.
Public addresses, letters, and narratives about the absence of and the need for citizenship rights for African Americans. Links to resources used to lobby for equal rights are provided at the top of the page.
Twenty nine primary sources-historical documents, literary texts, and visual images-that explore how enslaved individuals and families coped with, adjusted to, maintained communities within, and opposed the system of oppression.
An interview illustrating some of the ways community functioned in the lives of African Americans. It explores how external pressures of racism brought African Americans together to form fraternal organizations and entire towns.
Excerpts from a 1941 film that depicts black and white communities in Kannapolis, NC, by H. Lee Waters (1902-1997). This two part film characterizes the differences in economy, community, and values of two separate cultures.
A Thomas Edison film and an essay about the amusement park experience, a new leisure pastime made possible by urbanization and industrialization.
A series of illustrations and accounts of Spanish conquest of Indians that reflect the fascination with and the brutality directed against native cultures.
Thirty one primary sources including historical documents, literary texts, and visual images from which to explore European reactions to the land and the people of the New World and the Natives' responses to European contact and conquest.
A chapter, an interview, and film clips that illustrate cultural expressions of African American identity in the late-nineteenth century. Culture is explored during the turn of the 20th century within this resource and is supported by links to a variety of texts and video clips.
This resource presents James Farmer (1920-1999), a major figure in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, and the distinction he draws between integration and desegregation, two terms often used interchangeably and often confused.
Nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century recollections by former slaves of the absence of and obstacles to education for African Americans. Links to narratives of freed and newly freed slaves are provided.
Letters and narratives of slaves freed at the end of the Civil War. An interesting look at the confusion and eagerness which confronted these newly freed Americans.
Primary resource provides letters, statements, and photographs of free and enslaved African Americans who journeyed to Liberia to establish new lives and identities. Also includes questions for class discussion.
Portraits of early New Englanders as well as four buildings from seventeenth-century New England that accompany accounts in those British colonies of struggles, Indian hostilities, and economic success.
Three seventeenth-century homes in Pennsylvania and New York and three accounts from those English colonies of the factors leading to prosperity and permanence.
Three seventeenth-century buildings, two portraits, and three original accounts from Virginia and the Carolinas about the qualities and conditions of life in these southern English colonies that led to success and growth.
Two Spanish accounts of enslaved Indians in the Caribbean and enslaved Africans in Mexico and statements of the difficulty of maintaining slavery and the lurking threat of a slave revolt.
A collection of eight primary resources--historical documents, literary texts, visual images, maps--illuminated and contextualized by notes, thematic questions, and text-specific discussion questions for classroom instruction and teacher professional development.
Three European accounts of the disappointments, challenges, and outright failures to establish early successful colonial outposts in North America.