Learn how writer Zora Neale Hurston incorporated and transformed black folklife in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By exploring Hurston’s own life history and collection methods, listening to her WPA recordings of folksongs and folktales, and comparing transcribed folk narrative texts with the plot and themes of the novel, students will learn about the crucial role of oral folklore in Hurston’s written work.
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.
The Preamble is the introduction to the United States Constitution, and it serves two central purposes. First, it states the source from which the Constitution derives its authority: the sovereign people of the United States. Second, it sets forth the ends that the Constitution and the government that it establishes are meant to serve.
At the heart of the lesson are; seven sound experiments designed to help students understand how form, meter, and rhythm all combine to shape our experience of poetry and the meanings we derive from it.
In this lesson students will examine the various visions of three active agents in the creation and management of Great Britain’s empire in North America: British colonial leaders and administrators, North American British colonists, and Native Americans.
King Hammurabi ruled Babylon, located along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, from 1792–1750 BCE however, today he is most famous for a series of judgments inscribed on a large stone stele and dubbed Hammurabi's Code. In this lesson students will learn about the contents of the Code, and what it tells us about life in Babylonia in the 18th century BCE.
The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup’s narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.
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.
In this lesson, students explore the First Industrial Revolution in early nineteenth-century America. By reading and comparing first-hand accounts of the lives of workers before the Civil War, students prepare for a series of guided role-playing activities designed to help them make an informed judgment as to whether the changes that took place in manufacturing and distribution during this period are best described as a 'revolution' or as a steady evolution over time.
