Students examine Martin Puryear’s "Ladder for Booker T. Washington" and consider how the title of Puryear’s sculpture is reflected in the meanings we can draw from it. They learn about Booker T. Washington’s life and legacy, and through Puryear's ladder, students explore the African American experience from Booker T.'s perspective and apply their knowledge to other groups in U.S. History. They also gain understanding of how a ladder can be a metaphor for a person’s and a group’s progress toward goals.
When the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention convened in May of 1787 to recommend amendments to the Articles of Confederation, one of the first issues they addressed was the plan for representation in Congress. This lesson will focus on the various plans for representation debated during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
George Washington became President—reluctantly—at a critical time in the history of the United States. The Confederation had threatened to unravel; the weak central government (which included a weak executive with the sole responsibility of presiding over meetings of Congress and no special power to initiate laws beyond that of any member of Congress, enforce laws, or check acts of Congress) created by the Articles of Confederation had failed.
A close study of the poetry of contemporary Hopi artist and poet, Ramson Lomatewama. Students analyze Lomatewama’s masterful use of figurative language that creates a sense of place and describes his intimate relationship with the land and his experience of corn.
An exploration of the symbolism and imagery of corn and environment as manifested in Hopi song and traditional dances. Students analyze examples of historical and contemporary Hopi song and examine images of Hopi dance in order to expand cultural awareness.
A guided exploration of “Hopitutskwa,” the Hopi homeland, through maps and place names. Using English translations, students make inferences about the Hopi cultural relationship to landscape and place. They examine regional place names of their own home communities and create personal maps by identifying and naming places of importance in their lives.
In this lesson, students will learn that enslaved people resisted their captivity constantly. Because they were living under the domination of their masters, slaves knew that direct, outright, overt resistance—such as talking back, hitting their master or running away—could result in being whipped, sold away from their families and friends, or even killed.
Harriet Jacobs was the first woman to write a slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). She was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, and died free in Washington, D. C., at the age of eighty-four. Elizabeth Keckly was born into slavery in 1818 near Petersburg, Virginia. She learned to sew from her mother, an expert seamstress enslaved in the Burwell family.
In 1845, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Written by Himself was published. In it, Douglass criticizes directly—often with withering irony—those who defend slavery and those who prefer a romanticized version of it.
In this lesson, students analytically read “Learning to Read,” a poem by Francis Watkins Harper about an elderly former slave which conveys the value of literacy to Black people during and after slavery. The activities help students examine the experiences of enslaved people, the history of literacy, and 21st century values on the power of reading.