Students will write a 1,500-word piece celebrating the learning they have accomplished this semester.
You will be required to use lecture and assigned primary and secondary sources. Make sure you cite all material that is not your own original ideas. Failure to do so will result in a zero on the assignment, as this will violate the college’s rules regarding plagiarism.
You are to write in Times New Roman, 12-point font, double-spaced.While history papers generally use the https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citatio... I will not require you to be so extensive. You can either footnote or simply use parenthesis to cite a particular idea or quotation with the author and the page number i.e. (Adams, pg. 3);(Lecture 4, slide 10). Remember that any idea that is not your own needs to be properly cited. If you are concerned that you have not properly cited something, either e-mail me or cite the work so you do not have to worry about plagiarism.
I will be grading based on grammar, argument and ability to convey ideas, spelling, sourcing of materials, specificity, and content. Proofreading can only help you.
Students are required to use at least 4 assigned sources (primary and secondary sources). Lessons are good for situating context, but I’m really interested in what your analysis is of the assigned materials as you answer the prompt.
Prompt (Respond with at least 1500 words)
What perceptions did you come into this class with regarding African American history? How have your perceptions changed about a particular topic(s) and/or individuals? How will you apply what you learned in this course after this term ends? How will you discuss African American history within your own community? What topics and themes will you emphasize? (Topics and themes can include changing ideas about race, gender, class, settler colonialism, religion, Indigenous history, segregation, social movements, African American women’s roles in American society, etc.). Be specific.Week 2: Lesson 1: Africa to the Slave Ship: Crossing the Atlantic
Assigned Reading:
Primary Source: “An eyewitness account of the African slave trade by Olaudah Equiano, an Ibo prince kidnapped in the early 1760s”
Secondary Sources: Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2008), pp. 1-14; Sowande’ Mustakeem, “She must go overboard & shall go overboard”: Diseased Bodies and the Spectacle of Murder at Sea, Atlantic Studies, 8:3, pp. 301-316.
Optional Additional Sources for Further Study:
Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” in The American Historical Review v114 n5 (Dec 2009).
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 11/4 by 11:59pm
Week 2: Lesson 2: Slavery, Bodies, and Constructing Race in the American Colonies
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: “Virginia Establishes a Double Standard in Tax Law,” Assembly of Virginia, Act 1, 1643;
“According to the condition of the mother…,” Assembly of Virginia, 1662; “For the prevention of that abominable mixture…,” Assembly of Virginia, Act 16, 1691; A Law for Regulating Negroes and Slaves in the Night Time New York City, 1731; Louisiana's Code Noir (1724)
Secondary Sources: Jennifer Morgan, "Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder": Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770, in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1, Constructing Race (Jan., 1997), pp. 167-192; Jennifer Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe (2018) 22 (1 (55)): 1-17.
Optional Additional Resources to Practice Visual Analysis:
To continue practicing visual analysis and understanding the construction of race in early America see: Virtual Jamestown Index of White watercolors versus De Brye engravings and John Gabriel Stedman Collection.
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 11/4 by 11:59pm
Week 3: Lesson 3: Experiences of Enslavement: Violence, Resistance, and Community
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: The Confession of Nat Turner (1831); Frederick Douglass, Fourth of July Speech (1852)
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861); Maria Perkins, “I am quite heartsick…,” (1852); Rose, “Look for some others for to ‘plenish de earth,’” (1941)
Secondary Sources: Stephanie M.H. Camp, “The Pleasure of Resistance: Enslaved Women and the Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861” in Unequal Sisters, (New York, Rutledge, 2008), 83-107; Deirdre Cooper Owens, “Black Women’s Experiences in Slavery and Medicine,” in Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 42-72.
Optional Additional Reading About the Nat Turner Uprising:
Vanessa Holden, “Generation, resistance, and survival: African-American children and the Southampton Rebellion of 1831," in Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 38, 2017.
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Tuesday 11/12 by 11:59pm
Week 3: Lesson 4: Moving West: The Expansion of the Plantation Economy and the Growth of Industry
Assigned Reading:
Primary Source: Solomon Northup Describes a Slave Market, (1841); Wyandotte woman describes tensions over slavery, (1849); Pro-Slavery Cartoon, (1850); The Dred Scott Decision, (1857)
Secondary Sources: Tiya Miles, “The Narrative of Nancy, A Cherokee Woman,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 29:2-3 (2008), 59-80; Ben Franklin’s World, Episode 255: Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizenship
Optional Additional Resources:
For more on the relationship between race, slavery, and westward expansion see New Books Network Podcast Episode: Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas.
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Tuesday 11/12 by 11:59pm
Week 4: Lesson 5: From Slavery to Freedom: The Many Meanings of Reconstruction
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Mississippi Black Code (1865); Petition of Committee on Behalf of the Freedman to Andrew Johnson (1865); A Sharecropping Contract (1866); Ida B. Wells “From Southern Horrors” (1892); Mary McLeod Bethune, “How the Bethune-Cookman College campus started” (1941), pp 329-331; Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit Lyrics (1939)
Secondary Sources: Amanda K. Frisken, "A Song Without Words": Anti-Lynching Imagery in the African American Press, 1889-1898, in The Journal of African American History, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Summer 2012), pp. 240-269; Michael Ayers Trotti, What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South, in The Journal of American History, Vol. 100, No. 2 (September 2013), pp. 375-400.
For Further Optional Reading on Black Women During Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow:
Tera Hunter, Reconstruction and the Meanings of Freedom, in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 298-309; Glenda Gilmore, Forging Interracial Links in the Jim Crow South, in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 368-377
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday, 11/18 by 11:59pm
Week 4: Lesson 6: The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Plessy v. Ferguson, (1896); W.E.B DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,” (May, 1919); Walter White, "I Investigate Lynchings," (1929); Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” (1919); Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," (1926); Levi C. Hubert “The Whites Invade Harlem,” (1938); Crisis in Levittown (1957)
Secondary Sources: Watch Documentary, Making a Way Out of No Way, 1897-1940; Driving the Green Book, Episode 1: In the Time of the Green Book
Further Optional Resources:
Never heard music from the Harlem Renaissance? Listen here: Harlem Renaissance Playlist
Want to dig deeper into the Great Migration? Check out Riding Jane Crow
Angela Davis, Chapter 3 “Here Come My Train: Traveling Themes and Women’s Blues” in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, (Vintage Books: New York, 1998), pgs. 66-90.
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 11/18 by 11:59pm
Week 5: Lesson 7: The Black Experience of the Great Depression and WWII
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Tenant Farmers Recall the Conditions of Sharecropping in the 1930s; The Negro and the New Deal, (1936); Depression and New Deal Both Hit Black Farmers, (1937); A. Philip Randolph Argues for a March on Washington, (1942); An African-American Solider Notes the “Strange Paradox of the War, (1944)
Secondary Sources: Robin D.G. Kelley, "We Are Not What We Seem": Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South, in The Journal of American History, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jun., 1993), pp. 75-112; Megan E. Williams, The "Crisis" Cover Girl: Lena Horne, the NAACP, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941—1945, in American Periodicals, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2006), pp. 200-218.
For Further Investigation of Documenting Black Oral History During the Great Depression:
See the Library of Congress to read the Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938 collection created via New Deal funding during the Great Depression.
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 11/25 by 11:59pm
Week 5: Lesson 8: The Long Civil Rights Movement
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” (1963); Ella Baker, "Address at the Hattiesburg Freedom Day Rally," (1964); Fannie Lou Hamer, Testimony at the Democratic National Convention, (1964); Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet, (1964)
Secondary Sources: Jaqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 91 no. 4 (March 2005) pp. 1233-1263; Tanisha Ford, Ch. 1 “Dashiki,” Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2019), pgs 1-24.
Optional Additional Resource:
For an in depth look at local civil rights organizing efforts and the way the movement built across decades see: Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, (The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2003).
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 11/25 by 11:59pm
Week 6: Lesson 9: Black Power
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, (1966); The Black Panther Party 10 Point Program, (1966); The Black Panther Party: To Feed Our Children, (1969); Combahee River Collective Statement (1978);
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” (1984); “Black Power Mixtape”
Secondary Sources: Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., New Books Network, July 9, 2020; Ashley Farmer, Mary Phillips, Robyn C. Spencer, and Leela Yellesetty, Women in the Black Panther Party: A Roundtable
Optional Additional Resources:
For a deep dive into the lives and ideologies of Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) see:
The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael.
Extra Credit:
Documentary: “Remastered: The Two Killings of Sam Cooke,” On Netflix. (For 3 Points of Extra Credit)
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 12/2 by 11:59pm
Week 6: Lesson 10: Mass Incarceration, Police Brutality, and Black Lives Matter
Assigned Reading:
Primary Sources: Ibram X. Kendi, We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic, The Atlantic, May 4, 2020; Michelle Alexander, The Trayvon Generation, The New Yorker, June 15, 2020; Kimberle Crenshaw: The Urgency of Intersectionality
Secondary Sources: Sean J. Drake, Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in the American Suburb external, New Books in African American Studies, May 25, 2022; Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddamn: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice, New Books in African American Studies.
Additional Optional Resources:
Tanisha Ford, Ch. 10 “Hoodie,” and Epilogue “Designer Handbag,” Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2019), pgs 207-242; Matthew Lassiter, "Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs," in The Journal of American History, v 102 n 1, pp 126-140; Documentary: The Central Park Five
WEEKLY COMMENTS AND RESPONSES DUE: Monday 12/2 by 11:59pm
Week 7: Digital Research Poster, DUE: Monday 12/9 by 11:59pm
The Digital Poster Project asks students to embrace personal creativity and analytic skills. Students will pick one person we have learned about in this course and do extra research. This can include authors who wrote our primary/secondary sources, or someone we met through readings/lectures. Your poster needs to situate this person within their historical context by telling us who they were, where they were from, and their historical significance. Historically situating your person includes bringing in primary and/or secondary source readings from the term to incorporate into your poster. Posters will include images of your subject showing us where the person was from, or images that capture information about the person’s life in other ways: where they were born/lived, uprisings, profession, publications, family, social movements etc. Finally, this poster must reflect on the importance of the field of studying African American history using your subject as an entry point to discuss this discipline.
More information on this assignment can be found on Canvas.
File upload must be in a Word or PDF form for Canvas, however, if you prefer to do this as a blog or other online format, you may supply the link in a Word file so it is accessible from Canvas.