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Keywords: Reconstruction
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- Abstract: In November 1865 a group of 52 black delegates met in Charleston's Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the still uncertain world of the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves, rights that were endangered by widespread southern "Black Codes." The Black Codes were a series of laws introduced in the months after the war by the reconstituted state legislatures of the South. These laws were enacted to restrict the movements and employment possibilities of blacks regardless of whether they had been free or enslaved before the war?in essence to replace the constrictions of slavery.
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- Abstract: This course is a continuation of 24.951. This semester the course topics of interest include movement, phrase structure, and the architecture of the grammar.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
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- Abstract: African American History II is a course that examines the broad range of experiences of African Americans from the close of the American Civil War to the 1980s. We will explore both the relationship of blacks to the larger society and the inner dynamic of the black community. We will devote particular attention to Reconstruction, the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, and the political machinations of the African American community.
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- Abstract: The collection African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907, contains pamphlets and other materials, most of which were written by African American authors about pressing issues of the day. In this lesson, students use the collection's Timeline of African American History, 1852-1925 to identify problems and issues facing African Americans immediately after Reconstruction. Working in small groups on assigned issues, students search the collection for documents that describe the problem and consider opposing points of view, and suggest a remedy for the problem. Students then present the results of their research in a simulated African American Congress, modeled on a congress documented in the collection's special presentation, Progress of a People.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This lesson encourages students to identify problems facing African Americans immediately after Reconstruction. Students then work in small groups to identify documents describing a particular problem, consider opposing points of view, and suggest a solution and present their research findings.
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- Abstract: Isabelle Van Wagenen was born enslaved in New York State and became a well-known abolitionist speaker under the name Sojourner Truth after gaining her freedom in 1827. She moved to New York City where she engaged in evangelical and other reform activities; at various points she also lived in several utopian communities. Truth supported herself by traveling and speaking on abolitionist and women's rights subjects, taking the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. She often faced opposition at her speaking engagements. Truth made this extemporaneous speech in Akron Ohio in 1851 at a women's rights meeting. No direct record of the speech exists, but Frances Gage, a white activist and author who was presiding over the meeting, recalled it over a decade later. While some historians have questioned Gage's accuracy in reconstructing the syntax and even the exact language of Truth's oration, the power and charismatic force of her argument about the equality of women remains evident.
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- Abstract: This module introduces the idea of aliasing and gives examples of it in sampling and reconstruction problems.
- Subject:
Science and Technology
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
Connexions
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- Abstract: Since at least the 1830s, New York working women endured low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions. Concerned observers noted that some were even forced to turn to prostitution to supplement their meager incomes. During the Civil War, poor men flocked to the army (wealthier men could purchase substitutes for $300). The women left behind were now responsible for supporting families on their own. While wartime production created additional opportunities for women to work, it also led to even greater exploitation as factory owners pushed their workers to turn out more goods. Under these conditions, some women, such as this one, suggested that collective action might provide a solution.
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- Abstract: John Brown was a staunch abolitionist and a veteran of guerrilla warfare in Kansas who alarmed even free soilers with his forceful assertions of African-American equality. On October 16, 1859 Brown, three of his sons, and 19 associates raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Planning to seize arms stored at the arsenal and set up a base to encourage and assist further slave insurrections, Brown and his men were trapped by U.S. marines, tried for treason, and hanged. Southerners saw in Brown's raid the violent intentions of northerners, while many in the North mourned Brown's death as a revolutionary martyr. A Harper's Weekly artist sketched Brown and his co-conspirators as they were charged with treason and murder in a Charlestown, Virginia courtroom.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This site consists of tens of thousands of pieces of sheet music registered for copyright during the post-Civil War era. Included are popular songs, piano music, sacred music and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra. This first release of the online collection consists of over 22,000 musical compositions registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1879.
- Subject:
Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary
- Collection:
Library of Congress
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: The Five Points was a notorious mid-nineteenth century New York City slum. Located just east of the fashionable stores, columned banks, and well-dressed crowds of Broadway, its squalor served to remind New Yorkers of the destitution that so closely underlay the city's surging wealth. The neighborhood included the infamous "Old Brewery," which had once been a real brewery but by mid-century had degenerated into a miserable tenement dwelling for the very poor. In the early 1850s the New York Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church purchased the "Old Brewery," demolished it, and built a mission on the site. The women of the Home Missionary Society made children their first concern, as, increasingly, did many other reformers of this period. While in this selection these Protestant missionary women showcase the children's gratitude, many Irish-Catholic immigrant families resented the missionaries' assumption of superiority and regarded their proselytizing as antagonistic to their own desire to pass on their religious beliefs to their children.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This site offers 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 photos of former slaves. The collection can be searched by name, city, state, topic, or other key words. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary
- Collection:
Library of Congress
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: In this photograph, battle flags captured by northern troops during the Civil War are returned to aged Confederate veterans in a 1927 ceremony in front of the Capitol supervised by President Calvin Coolidge. Such rites of reconciliation between the Blue and the Gray represented a rapprochement between whites and ignored the central importance of slavery to the war, as well as the contribution of black troops. More damaging, this attitude of reconciliation obscured the repressive state of race relations in the South during the 1920s.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: After the Civil War began, slaves were sometimes seized from their masters and forced into service for the Confederate army. This illustration from a May 1862 issue of Harper's Weekly depicted one way that the institution of slavery contributed to the Confederacy's war effort. According to the caption, the northern newspaper artist observed this struggle between two Negroes and a rebel captain" through a telescope. The captain "insisted upon their loading a cannon within range of [Union] Sharpshooters. . . . [He] succeeded in forcing the Negroes to expose themselves
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Americans were not prepared for the ravages of modern warfare. Early in the war, artists often drew highly romantic and very inaccurate pictures. Soldiers in the field viewed such feats as firing from the saddle with great amusement; they enjoyed seeing illustrations of their exploits almost as much as they enjoyed criticizing their inaccuracies. As the war continued and the carnage mounted, increasingly realistic battlefield sketches conveyed the horrors of war to the northern public.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: The political landscape in the South underwent significant change during the twentieth century. Political and social change in Southern states was directly connected to some of the landmark events of American history, particularly the Civil Rights Movement. An understanding of the role of politics in the South is essential to comprehension of the history and culture of the region.
The oral histories in this site illuminate changes in Southern politics from the end of the Civil War up to the present day. The recollections and opinions of the important political figures interviewed in these oral histories help form an impression of the role of Southern politics in the tumultuous events of the twentieth century in America. Listen as eyewitnesses recount the effects of politics and changing political beliefs on the story of the American South.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Anti-slavery and the intensification of sectionalism in the 1850s; the secession crisis; political and military developments in the Civil War years; why the North won; and the political, economic, and social legacies of the conflict. Although attention will be devoted to the causes and long-term consequences of the Civil War, this class will focus primarily on the war years (1861-1865) with special emphasis on the military and technological aspects of the conflict. Four questions, long debated by historians, will receive close scrutiny: 1. What caused the war? 2. Why did the North win the war? 3. Could the South have won? 4. To what extent is the Civil War America's "defining moment"?
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Although Thomas Nast was an ardent supporter of equal rights, he often resorted to racial and ethnic stereotypes in his Harper's Weekly cartoons. Questioning the actions of some southern black Republican legislators, in the cartoon on the left Nast drew the figure of "Columbia," symbol of the nation, chiding: "You are aping the lowest whites. If you disgrace your race in this way you had better take back seats." Nast got a taste of his own medicine in this answering cartoon (right) on the cover of the New York Daily Graphic, entitled "I Wonder How Harper's Artist Likes To Be Offensively Caricatured Himself?" Such consciousness in the press about offensive imagery would not last long. By the 1880s, with the end of a national commitment to black equality, racist stereotypes characterized most published cartoons and illustrations.
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