What conditions provided the impetus for the Sedition Act? Partisan animosity was strong during Adams's presidency. The first two political parties in the U.S. were in their infancy—the Federalists, to which the majority of members of Congress belonged, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by former vice-president Thomas Jefferson and four-term Congressman James Madison, who had left the House in 1796.
One of the heroes of the Battle of Bunker Hill was Salem Poor, an African American. Black people fought on both sides during the American Revolution. Census data also reveal that there were slaves and free Blacks living in the North in 1790 and after. What do we know about African-American communities in the North in the years after the American Revolution?
This Activity focuses on one American Indian Nation, the Anishinaabe, also known as the Ojibwe, Ojibway, or Chippewa Indians. Students will learn how to conduct a research project on different historical, geographical, and cultural aspects of this Native American group.
In 1798, Jefferson predicted the consequences of the passage of the Sedition (and Alien) Act. In this lesson, students will look at documents reflecting some of the consequences of the Sedition Act. How close was Jefferson's prediction?
Understanding the Patriot attitude toward the British monarchy is helpful in understanding the Founders’ reluctance to have a strong executive under the Articles of Confederation as well as their desire to build in checks of executive power under the Constitution.
In this lesson students learn how Birth of a Nation reflected and influenced racial attitudes, and they analyze and evaluate the efforts of the NAACP to prohibit showing of the film.
Thomas Day (1801–ca. 1861) was a successful free black furniture maker and businessman who stood “in the middle” of competing forces in nineteenth-century America: between black and white, slave and free, North and South, and Africa and America.
Was the Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded World War I, a legitimate attempt by the victorious powers to prevent further conflict, or did it place an unfair burden on Germany? This lesson helps students respond to the question in an informed manner. Activities involve primary sources, maps, and other supporting documents related to the peace process and its reception by the German public and German politicians.
