Curriculum Resources: Presidents Day and Black History Month

Looking for a fun and educational way to celebrate Presidents Day this weekend?  Check out some new interactive educational video games on American history produced by WNET, the public broadcasting channel for New York City, geared specifically for middle school students.

Entitled Mission US, these FREE games allow students to see pivotal periods in American history through the eyes of a young person at the time.   In each chapter, the character has some tasks to perform, which cause him or her to interact with a number of other characters that provide contrasting viewpoints.  However, there are multiple pathways through the game.  What the character will experience will vary from game to game, based on the decisions made by the students directing the action.

The first game is entitled "For Crown or Colony?"  In this game, students play the role of a young printer's apprentice in Boston during the rising conflicts between British authorities and American revolutionaries.  The game provides the perspectives of people both for and against Independence, until the students are required to choose one side or the other.

The second mission is "Flight to Freedom."  This time, students play as Lucy, a 14-year-old slave in Kentucky, as she attempts to escape to Ohio.  Even if she makes it, there are plenty of challenges even in the supposedly "free" colonies.  This game presents the ethical dilemnas and viewpoints from all around (such as, is it OK to steal from struggling farmers as you travel along the Underground Railroad?)


While these two missions are the only ones completed right now, there are two more that will be released in 20123 and 2014.  Mission 3 covers the time of the transcontinental railroad and is entitled "The Race for the Golden Spike, while Mission 4, "The Sidewalks of New York," allows students to become muckraking journalists in early 20th Century New York.

While the first two games don't feature George Washington or Abraham Lincoln per se, they are great vehicles for a more nuanced exploration of their times than many curricular materials.  Mission 2 is also a great tie in with Black History month.  And there are some related games you can play, such as "Think Fast! About the Past," a timed historical knowledge game, and a music game.

Here are trailers for the first two missions:







The bottom line is, if your children enjoyed the "Liberty's Kids" PBS cartoon series on the American Revolution as much as my son did during his elementary school years, then you'll definitely want to check out Mission US.  And if they didn't, maybe this will do the trick of turning them on to US history.

Black History Month Curriculum Resource: Jazz with Nneena Freelon

As I stated in an earlier post, we are studying the Harlem Renaissance right now, which happens to coincide with Black History Month.  As part of our studies, this past weekend we went to hear Nneenna Freelon, a world-renowned comtemporary jazz singer.

It was a great experience, because while I think all music sounds better performed live, it may be particularly important for jazz performances.  We can talk about jazz and study jazz and even watch videos and listen to CDs about jazz, but that is still not the same as watching someone perform jazz.

And Ms. Freelon is, indeed, wonderful, as might be expected from someone who has been nominated for a Grammy award six separate times.

You can hear some samples of her songs on her website at:  http://nnenna.com/music/.

However, one of the issues of teaching our children about jazz is the fact that the songs are unfamiliar to them, and they all just sound like "old music."  But at the conference, I found a great way to deal with that issue.

Nneena Freelon has an album entitled "Tales of Wonder," which is based on Stevie Wonder songs.   It includes jazz takes on such familiar Stevie Wonder songs as "Superstition" and "My Cheri Amour."  While these aren't timely hits, students are much more likely to have heard them than traditional jazz classics (we've been working on his mastery of Classic Rock artists while driving in the car).  But because he does know the original versions of these songs, it gives him a better feeling for jazz interpreations of songs.

So I recommend her songs in general for a modern singer with classic jazz roots.  But I have really found Tales of Wonder to be useful in helping my middle schooler understand jazz.

Black History Month Curriculum Resource: The Harlem Renaissance

Black History Month is coming up, and it happens to coincide with the time we are studying the history of the 1920's and 1930's.  So what better topic to combine the two than the Harlem Renaissance?

We have already been working on it some, but I recently found what I think is a fantastic resource.  John Carroll University has created the Harlem Renaissance Multimedia Resource, which pulls so much information about this fascinating period of modern American history into a central site.

What I love about this website--beside the fact that it is FREE--is that it includes not only the aspects of the Harlem Renaissance that most of us tend to think about, such as the music and the literature, but also the politics, the philosophy, the education, and even the international connections.  There is a whole section on religion as well; in fact, throughout the entire site I saw the predecessors of Martin Luther King Jr's thoughts, philosophies, actions, and words.  It not only has multimedia resources--pictures, audio, and a little video (all that I found was Billie Holiday)--but also lots of links to other websites with even more comprehensive information on that particular topic.

Particularly helpful to me were the timelines included and the map of Harlem itself.  It has a general timeline of the political and artistic events during that period, which helps me put things in order.  Even more interesting to us right now, however, was the timeline of the music.  My son has been getting more interested in jazz, about which I am not that knowledgable (confessional--even though two of my brothers were performers, students, and aficionados of that musical genre, and my father is at least a long-time fan).  The timeline helped me understand how ragtime gradually morphed into swing, with dates, different jazz styles, artist bios, and short audios of outstanding pieces along the way.

So if you are looking for resources about black musicians, writers, thinkers, educators, or politicians, this  website is a great place to look.

Curriculum Resource: Reconstruction

As I said earlier this week, teaching about the Civil War is tough for us.  It is also hard to teach about Reconstruction, which was another non-stellar point in our history.  However, in some ways Reconstruction is even harder because of the paucity of resources, especially compared to all the stuff that is available for the Civil War.

Here are some of the curriculum resources we found useful in covering the Reconstruction with our middle schoolers:

A History of US:  Reconstruction and Reform 1865-1870 by Joy Hakim is a great overview of the specific time of the Reconstruction.  This is a good book for middle schoolers.

Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow  1864-1896 by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier.  This one covers a longer time span and is at a bit higher level, so it would probably be appropriate for high school as well as middle schoolers.

They Called Themselves the K.K.K.:  The Birth of an American Terrorist Group by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.  This is an excellent book that I reviewed last year when it came out; you can read the full review here.  But the short version is that the book describes the evolution of the Ku Klux Klan from its earliest days as sort of a informal frat for ex-Confederates trying to feel better about their defeat to the powerful hate organization it was up through the 1960s, told mostly from first-hand reports.  It is appropriate to both middle and high schoolers.

Black Voices from Reconstruction 1865-1877 by John David Smith.  While not as engaging as the previous book, this one also contains personal and first-hand sources and covers some broader subjects of the time than were left out of the KKK book.  Again, this could be used by middle and higher schoolers.

Forty Acres and Maybe a Mule by Harriette Gillem Robinet.  A bit different from the previous titled, this is a fictionalized account of what life might have been like for a small group of freed African Americans, written by an author whose ancestors had been slaves of Robert E. Lee's.    This is a middle school level book.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow is the website for an award-winning educational documentary series that explores segregation from Reconstruction through the modern Civil Rights movement.  I haven't seen the videos themselves, but they sound like they would be really good to watch.  However, on the website, you can view a timeline of major events from Reconstruction up to the mid-20th Century, interact with maps and other online resources, read the stories of some significant black leaders from the Reconstruction on, and access lesson plans for both middle school and high school grades.

As always, if someone has some other good resources to add to this list, please put them in the comments below.

Are We Still Fighting the Civil War? If So, What Do We Teach our Children?

One of my favorite quotes is William Faulkner's unforgettable statement that "The past is never dead.  It is not even the past."  Nowhere is this more evident lately than in the educational issues that arise with the Civil War Sesquicentennial--the marking of the fact that earlier this month was the 150th Anniversary of the Southern takeover of Fort Sumter, usually hailed as the official opening of the American Civil War.

Dealing with the Civil War is tough for us as a nation.  To use another iconic quote, I think the American Civil War was truly for us the period in our history where "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  It was a time when our commitment to our founding ideals of freedom and equality were really put the test, and ultimately prevailed.  But it was also a time where we had to face how our country had ignored those ideals for the cause of economic profits, both in the North and in the South.  It was a horribly sad time, destructive of land and of a generation of young people, and still the bloodiest and most deadly war in which the US has ever engaged.  But it also laid the foundations for an American dream that was even broader and more inclusive than the founding fathers ever imagined...even if it has taken decades of continued struggles to achieve it.

I think probably all nations have a civic mythology of their historic greatness that endows them with power and respect (see Hugh Grant's wonderful "England may be a small nation, but we're a great one, too" speech from one of my favorite movies ever, Love Actually, as one example).   Maybe it is because we are such a relatively young nation, and one that was gifted with incredible natural resources, but I think this idea of our past as inherently blessed and outstanding--our historic belief in America as "the city on the hill" and our Manifest Destiny--has an even stronger hold on our civic identity than it does on most countries.

So that is why I think it is so hard for us as a country to deal with this time in our history honestly and openly and in an unvarnished way.  It exposes some of our ugliest truths, and few of us like to acknowledge those.  Therefore, both sides like to romanticize their cause.  For the North, it is presented as a fight for the liberation of African Americans.  Except, really, it wasn't.  As Lincoln wrote towards the beginning of the war, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it," (although he personally was in favor of the abolitionist cause).  At least at the beginning, the fight for the North was keeping the country together, not securing rights for black people.  Eventually Lincoln, and at least some other Northern leaders, realized that slavery had to be abolished to secure a united nation, but even so, few Northerners envisioned African Americans being given political and economic benefits equal to white people.

For the South, the argument has grown that it was not really an issue of slavery per se, but rather of states' rights of self determination.  Except, again, really, it wasn't....at least according to almost all legitimate historians of our times.  The investment in slaves at the time of the Civil War has been estimated to be about $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars.  As a share of the Gross National Product at the time, that would compare to almost $10 TRILLION in modern money.  People had more money invested in slaves than they did in railroads, factories, banks, and ships combined.  The cotton produced by slave labor was the driving economic product for the entire nation, both from cotton-selling states in the South and textile-producing states in the North.  It was not something that South plantation owners, who were the political powerhouses in the South, could even conceive of giving up voluntarily.  And while it is true that the majority of Southerners, especially those who actually fought in the war, owned no slave themselves, most were fueled by their horror and fear of what would happen to their communities if African Americans, whom they believed to be an inferior species of humans, were not kept under control via the institution of slavery.

However, we don't like admitting that our greed and economic tunnel vision led us to go against our founding principles and to have treated people as inhumanly as we did.  So not long after the war came to an end, the South began to glorify its role in the Civil War as an advocate for states' rights, lovingly couched as the romantic "Lost Cause," rather than seeing their support for slavery for the morally indefensible position that it truly is.  An article in the April 18th edition of Time magazine entitled "The Civil War: 150 Years After Fort Sumter:  Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War" by David von Drehle does a great job  of explaining how the South sold this vision to the country; you can read the article as a PDF by clicking here.

But though the states' rights argument is largely a face-saving myth, it has been powerfully effective (largely, I believe, because we want to see our 19th century ancestors with the same aura of wisdom and moral vision that we ascribe to our 18th century founders).  A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 48% of people believed that states' rights was the main cause of the Civil War compared to 38% who thought it was mostly about slavery (with 9% saying the two causes were equally important).  A Harris poll confirmed this finding, with 54% responding that states' rights was the primary motivation for the South's split from the US, compared to 46% attributing it to an attempt to preserve slavery.

So it is really interesting to see that the majority of Americans do not know what almost all professional historian agree was the root cause of the American Civil War.    Is that an indication that we are continuing to fight the Civil War--if not with each other, then with our ideals about how we would like our history to be?

A liberal (actually, he's a democratic socialist) columnist in the Washington Post recently wrote another interesting article about the Civil War still being waged in modern times.  In his April 12 column, "150 years later, we're still fighting," Harold Meyerson argues that the North and the South have continued the labor patterns of the pre-Civil War US, with the South's tradition of low-wage and few or no worker benefits or rights (epitomized by the Arkansas-based Wal-Mart) versus the North's support for organized, unionized, and better paid labor, battling for dominance out West (cough cough WISCONSIN cough) and in the nation at large.   I found his article to be interesting reading, and looking over only a few of the 270 comments to date shows that it has definitely generated some heated debate.

Another article I would recommend is a CNN post on April 11 by John Blake called "Four ways we're still fighting the Civil War."  Blake picks out four ways that today's politics are similar to those of the Civil War era:

1. A lack of the political center (You agree with us or you are the evil enemy, with no room for compromise)
2. Arguments over the role of the federal government (Some of the Tea Party leaders sound like antebellum Southerners)
3. Underestimating the extent of war once begun (Both North and South were convinced the conflict would be over within a few weeks because they underestimated the strength of the opposition....sound familiar?)
4. Presidents overstepping their bounds (I don't really agree that Obama's support of health care is comparable to Lincoln's suspension of Constitutional rights, but I guess there are some that are arguing that...)

So, like I said....it is not like the Civil War is really over.

But where does that leave us as parents and as educators?  What should we be teaching students when this event that they think of as ancient history is still so much in flux today?  Clearly, there must be mixed messages, if not outright errors, in what we are teaching students about the Civil War.  One of the most interesting data points in the Pew survey was the fact that the group that was most like to say that states' rights was the primary cause of the Civil War was people under 30, with 60% of that age cohort claiming that viewpoint.  The group that was least likely to choose the states' rights scenario were people who 65 or older--those who most likely to have experienced the turbulence of the racial civil rights battles of the 1960s.    That was the only group to select slavery over states' rights as the principle factor in the Civil War, which they did by a 50% to 34% margin.

Personally, I think it is a good thing that we are still unsettled as a nation about the meaning, the outcomes, and even the causes of the Civil War.  I think students will find history more interesting when they see it is not something cut and dried and in the past, but a study that is still being debated, still being questioned, still being fleshed, and DEFINITELY still relevant to the choices we are making about our future.  I believe it is wonderful for the students to consider that the Civil War is still not really "done," and that it may be their generation who will be the ones who "settle" it (or not....)

Other than that, I say that we need to tell them the truth.  I was raised in the "Great Man" presentation of history, where all these wonderful things happened thanks to our national demi-Gods like George Washington and company.  But I don't think that really serves our students.  First of all, it isn't true.    Not to disparage our Founding Fathers and other major figures of history, but sometimes....maybe a lot of the time...they were able to accomplish what they did because they were lucky, or happened to be in the right place at the right time, or were merely the manifestation of the mores of their times, rather than the causal agent.  Secondly, when we set up these figures on a pedestal, how can our children ever hope to emulate them?   Showing them as humans, flawed with strengths and weaknesses just like the rest of us, is, I believe, a more powerful place to develop our heroes and leaders of the future.  Third, we hate to look at our failings and our ugly parts and the times we didn't live up to our ideals.  But without truth, there can not be forgiveness and redemption and ultimately, reconciliation.

And if there is anything we need in our political sphere these days, I think reconciliation is way up there.

Black History Month Lesson Plan: African American Quilt Art

This is a project that I did for our 19th Century History Coop, but that also works for Black History Month.

We have studied quilt patterns as an art project in our history coop.  However, mostly we study the quilt patterns from European cultures.  African Americans, including (and, unfortunately, primarily) slaves, also made quilts during the 17th-19th century.  But because the slave quilts were used so much, relatively few of them have survived to modern times.

However, by looking at those that have lasted, along with studying the African American stories, it appears that there were significant differences between quilts made by the African Americans around the time of the Civil War and those of the white cultures.

First of all, there was the reality of quilts made by slaves that they generally only received the worst scraps of fabrics from their white owners.  Thus, they didn't necessarily have the ability to plan color-coordinated quilts using large amounts of the same materials.

Secondly, many African American quilts drew their designs from African traditions of textile designs, rather than the white American approach.  Some of those African traditions included:

• bold and contrasting colors
• asymmetric patterns (rather than the symmetric patterns preferred by European/American cultures)
• lots of different patterns (apparently the ruling Africans showed their wealth/power by wearing fabrics woven with lots of different patterns, so different patterns were a sign of status within some African cultures)
• irregular patterns that break straight lines (apparently some African tribes believed that bad spirits traveled in straight lines, so rather than maintaining a straight pattern that would create a straight line, they would interrupt the pattern and break the straight line, which was supposed to disperse the bad spirits)

Perhaps most importantly, however, is that the finest African American quilts that have survived suggest that blacks of that time created appliques story quilts.  Here are two examples of biblical story quilts from a freed slave quilt artist of the late 19th century, Harriet Powers:

When I asked my students why the slaves would have created story quilts, none of them got all of the potential answers quite right.  However, we assume these quilts were created because:

1. To continue the African (but really universal) tradition of oral storytelling
2. Because most slaves were not allowed to learn to read and write (in order to reduce their ability to protest or to escape their slavery), this was the best way to capture their lives and their stories
3. When families were split up, this was one way to remind a lost spouse, sibling, or child of their family or place of origin (since they weren't able to write or send photographs)

So for our hands-on activity in this lesson, we created paper quilts out of scrapbook and other paper.  Each student was supposed to make a square that was an example of either African American quilt patterns or that was a story quilt.  Some examples are below:

As usual, the results were unique and creative, while still demonstrating an understanding of the lesson.