1. Link to the Class Assignments. Here you will find the weekly assignments.

2. Read the required chapters from the assigned book and send in your essay answers for the reading.
   
3. The essay answers are to be written in paragraph form and are to be IN YOUR OWN WORDS. If a quote is used in the paper, it should be short (a sentence or two) and be in quotation marks and/or italics. Here's an example: "It is two old worlds that linked up, making one new world." (Flyover History, p.11) Plagiarism will result in a 0. If a student is caught plagiarizing on a second essay, s/he will receive an F for the course.

4. Once you have completed the essay/s- send all of your work to me at pmyers@accd.edu. Be certain to label the email's subject area with the course name- History 2381 and essay topic. Although I prefer that all work is directly submitted on to your email, you may send one attachment with your essay work. If you use an attachment, you must use the program Microsoft Word.

5. You are required to read all three books, submit essays, and select another book regarding African-American history.

6. The Final Exam is a book critique and a course evaluation. It is REQUIRED.

7. Requirement! Please include your name, course name, and subject on all emails (and attachments). Your email address is not enough. I find it hard to remember email addresses (e.g. mama1@yahoo.com = Sue or huskyman@juno.com = Harry) but I will get to know your name within a few weeks.

8. Due dates are important. Once an essay's due date has past, you missed it. LATE WORK IS NOT ACCEPTED.

9. When you have a question or comment or concern about a particular theme or the course, please label your email with a word such as: QUESTION, COMMENT, PROBLEM, URGENT... This way I'll be able to differentiate the assignment essay emails (which take more time to read and assess) from the emails that need immediate attention.

10. All of your essay work will be graded usually within 48 hours. I will send your grade directly to you through your email address. There is not a place on the Web to view your grades, so be sure to keep a record of your grades. If you happen to lose track of any of your grades, please email me.

11. If you do not hear back from me within 48 hours of the theme's due date, please contact me at pmyers@accd.edu and/or leave me a message on my phone at 210/921-5058. BUT before you do so, check the Bulletin Board's News of the Day to see if there is a reason for the delay.

12. SAVE ALL WORK during the semester! There have been times when an email has not reached me. When this occurs, I ask that the student re-send the theme work to me. Do not delete any of your theme work during the semester. Save it on a disk and your harddrive.

13. Check the Bulletin Board on a regular basis. (At least twice a week.) The Bulletin Board is your lifeline to this course. This History Internet course is dynamic and ever-changing; I encourage you to check out what's happening and this is the page to read first. Here you will find all of the announcements about: due dates, essay assignments and any other information you need in order to successfully complete the course.

14. Students are to read all THE REQUIRED BOOKS to their fullest potential. I will also direct students to vitally important information sources available on the World Wide Web. (All themes have web resource links.)

15. Although I attempt to keep current on all the Web links for the course, occasionally sites are removed from the Internet. If you ever discover a link which is "broken", please inform me ASAP. I'd appreciate it.

16. At this point, click on the course Syllabus. Students with individual questions or comments should direct them to me at pmyers@accd.edu, or phone me at 210/921-5058. Please keep in touch . Have a great semester.

Many Thousands Gone Notes

Read pages 1-92 in Many Thousands Gone- Societies with Slaves: The Charter Generations.

Submit THREE questions on the reading and the orientation questionnaire for January 22nd.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER- pages 1-92:
How does one study African-American history without becoming mired in victimization?
Why slavery?
How did slavery change over the course of two centuries?
The Chesapeake-
Why were 17th century slaves often allowed to work independently?
How could 17th century slaves assert their "independence"?
The North-
Why were few slaves sent directly from Africa to North America?
How did black lives change after England took over New Amsterdam?
What role did the chirch play in black lives in the 17th century?
How did the burial grounds become the first truly African-American institution in the North>
Low Country-
What were the reasons for having slaves?
What were maroon colonies?
Why did Florida become a haven for ruanaway slaves?
What was the importance of the Stono Uprising?
The Lower Missisippi Valley-
How were Mississippi slaves different than othr slaves in North America?
What were the Code Noir laws?
What contributed to the high mortality rate for slaves?

Submit THREE questions on the reading and the orientation questionnaire for January 22nd.

How did the idea of race begin in America?
View: Understanding Race

. Finish reading pages 1-92 in Many Thousands Gone.

Student divisions for the book- Many Thousands Gone:
Cesar Bernal- The Lowcountry
Jason Casillas- The Lower Missisippi Valley
Ashley Kendig- The Chesapeake
Aissa Reyes- The North
Alex Ruiz- The Chesapeake

On Wednesday evening, January 30th Chuck D of Public Enemy will present a talk- Music Beyond Lyrics: There is More to Rap Than What Sells. The lecture will be at Trinity University in the Laurie Auditorium at 7 pm. It's free and open to the public.

How did the idea of race begin in America?
View: Understanding Race

Colonial Authority: Government 1600-1775

Many Thousands Gone Notes

Read pages 93-216 in Many Thousands Gone- Slave Societies: The Plantation Generations

Discuss Many Thousands Gone- Slave Societies: The Plantation Generations
Create a minimum of one question for each section of Slave Societies: The Plantation Generations

Here are the student divisions for the book- Many Thousands Gone:
Cesar Bernal- The Lowcountry
Jason Casillas- The Lower Missisippi Valley
Ashley Kendig- The Chesapeake
Aissa Reyes- The North
Alex Ruiz- The Chesapeake
Ashley Molinar- ?

Many Thousands Gone Notes
Read pages 217-368 in Many Thousands Gone- Slave and Free: The Revolutionary Generations

Discuss Many Thousands Gone- Slave and Free: The Revolutionary Generations

Create a minimum of one question for each section of Slave and Free: The Revolutionary Generations
Submit a minimum one page typed prospectus of the paper you will research for Many Thousands Gone.

Prospectus paper due. An example of a prospectus paper.

Read pages 1-109 in Slaves in the Family.

Many Thousands Gone PAPER DUE.

Read pages 110-214 in Slaves in the Family.

Read pages 215-350 in Slaves in the Family.

Read pages 351-459 in Slaves in the Family.

Questions on Slaves in the Family.

Slaves in the Family PAPER DUE.

Read the preface and pages 3-108.At the Hands of Persons Unknown.

Read pages 109-214 in At the Hands of Persons Unknown.

Read pages 215-323 in At the Hands of Persons Unknown.

Submit a one page typed prospectus of the book you have chosen to read and research.

Jim Crow America

Read pages 324-465 in At the Hands of Persons Unknown.

Submit a minimum one page typed prospectus of the paper you will research for At the Hands of Persons Unknown

At the Hands of Persons Unknown PAPER DUE.

Discussion of At the Hands of Persons Unknown

Harlem Renaissance
Marcus Garvey

Civil Rights
Malcolm X

Book Discussions and Oral Reports.

Book Discussions and Oral Reports.

Book Critique and Course Evaluation

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Ira Berlin (1998) The Belknap Press of Harvard University press (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

• New map of the terraqueous globe according to the latest discoveries and most general divisions of it into continents and oceans. - Edward Wells, 1700

  (ter•ra•que•ous adj. Composed of land and water. [Latin terra, earth; see ters- in Indo-European Roots + aqueous.] (source:dictionary.com)
  (In book- see The Atlantic Littoral ca. 1700)

• NO MORE AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME

• Does slavery still exist in our world?
  Slavery in the Bible
  (source: http://www.religioustolerance.org)

• Slavery itself continually changed.
• Slave relations meant that slavery was intrinsically unstable.
• Slavery was never made, but instead was continually remade… (p. 3)
• Slavery: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all.
• If slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class.
• Since labor defined the slaves’ existence, when, where, and especially how slaves worked determined in large measure the course of their lives. But despite the centrality of their labor, the history of black people cannot be reduced to it. (p. 5)

Four Different Slave Societies:

1. The North
2. The Chesapeake region
3. Coastal low country of South Carolina, , Georgia, and Florida
4. Lower Mississippi Valley

At the beginning of the 19th century, when this book concludes, the vast majority of black people, slave and free, did not reside in the blackbelt, grow cotton, or subscribe to Christianity. (p. 14)

I- Societies With Slaves: The Charter Generations

• Atlantic Creoles- traced their beginnings in the historic encounter of Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa.(p.17)
• Creole defined- http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=creole.
• West Coast of Africa- http://hum.lss.wisc.edu/bplummer/hist330/images.html
• Trading factories/Feitorias - European expansionists established along the coast of Africa in the 15th century. (p. 18)
• Dutch Fort in Elmina- Portuguese were the first to reached Elmina (Da Mina) in 1471, and built the fort, Sao George da Mina, in 1482. It was the first European fort on the Gold Coast and was improved before 1500. (source: http://www.atidekate.com/)
• Fort St. Jorge:
  
• 1572 2000

  (p. 19)

• Color was only one marker of this culture-in-the-making, and generally the least significant. (p. 20)
• With the settlement of the Americas, creole communities began to appear on the western side of the Atlantic. (p. 26)

The African Diaspora

Shipping Slaves

The Middle Passage

African-American Names

When native populations withered under the onslaught of European conquest and disease, plantation slavery became African slavery. “These two words, Negro and Slave,” had “by custom grown Homogeneous and convertible,” wrote an English prelate in 1680. (p. 97)

Caribbean Sugar Mill c.1750 & A Tobacco Plantation in 1788

Colonial Williamsburg

Bought and Sold In Williamsburg (video): Scientific American Frontiers: Unearthing Secret America

Carter’s Grove
Carter’s Grove

Slave Quarter at Carter’s Grove
Slave Quarter at Carter’s Grove

The Great House- The Plantation House e.g. – Mount Vernon

The War for American Independence in particular gave slaves new leverage in their struggle with their owners, offering the opportunity to challenge both the institution on chattel bondage and the allied structures of white supremacy. (p. 219)

The turmoil of war marked only the beginning of the slaveholders’ problems. The invocation of universal equality- most prominently in the Declaration of Independence- furthered the slaves’ hand. (p. 220)

How can Americans complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery? –Tom Paine (1775)

The Declaration of Independence

Jefferson's Cop Out

Jefferson's Blood

Slave Housing at Monticello

An evangelical upsurge that presumed all were equal in God’s eyes complemented and sometimes reinforced revolutionary idealism and placed new pressure on slaveholders. (p. 220)

• American Revolution
• French Revolution
• Haitian Revolution http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/dgeggus/htnrevn.htm

Map of Haiti

With the slaves’ success in creating the Haitian republic, neither master nor slave could doubt the possibility of a world turned upside down. (p. 222)>Map of Haiti

More people lived in slavery at the end of the revolutionary age than at the beginning. (p. 223)

An ingenious construction of revolutionary ideology carved from the very ideals of universal liberty… presented slaveholders and their allies with a powerful defense against abolition. If indeed all men were created equal and some men were slaves- the argument ran- then, perhaps, those who remained in the degraded condition of slaves were not fully men after all. (p. 224)

The transit between slavery and freedom was neither direct nor linear. (p. 224)

Slavery was ubiquitous in both colonial America and the early republic. There were no regional boundaries for where African and African-American slaves were located. One region in particular- The North- was at the center of slavery and in particular the slave trade. New York City became the second largest importer of slaves in North America (Charles Town, South Carolina was first). No aspect of northern society was left untouched by slavery. And northerners were steeped in making a profit from it, even if the vast majority of them did not own slaves.

School children are often taught that slavery was practiced primarily –if not exclusively- in the South. History is presented in a dichotomy of black and white, good and bad, with no gray areas. Today, teaching about slavery is more balanced in our educational system as compared to when I attended elementary school in the 1960’s. Slavery is shown in more complex ways than just discussing the plantation system. However, northerners are still largely portrayed as the do-gooders who led the charge against slavery, while southerners were almost solely the owners of black people.

Ira Berlin goes to great lengths in his 1998 book Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America that the North was entwined in all aspects of slavery. From the Expansion of Creole Society through the Growth and the Transformation of Black Life to The Slow Death of Slavery, Berlin examines the transformation of slavery in a region of our nation’s history which has been largely ignored.

In this paper, I will analyze that transformation and how we can better integrate slavery and the North into a more comprehensive history of our country’s past.

Slaves in the Family (SITF) by Edward Ball

How did SITF provoke a reaction?
How did Ball's white relatives react?
How did the descendants of the Ball slaves react?
How did you react?
Why did Edward Ball write this book?
What were his goals? Was Ball successful? Explain your reasoning.
What can one learn about the past by reading SITF?

Ball’s beginning questions:
1- Who were the Ball family?
2- Who were the Ball slaves? (Where did they go?)

Why slavery? Why slaves in the family?

What caused slavery to take hold in America?

How prominent was miscegenation?
Why does Ball spend so much time dealing with the issue of sex?
Edward Ball asked: How did the Ball family treat their slaves? How does Ball attempt to answer that question?

How does Ball rely upon oral and written traditions in researching SITF?
How reliable are his sources?
How can one attempt to find this out?

How does Edward Ball attempt to piece his book together through documentary records, "real" evidence, and hearsay? (p. 411)

Where did the idea of African slavery originate?
Why did is take such a hold in America?
How was it justified? (p. 311)

Why did democracy scare the Balls?

Charleston Work House (p.305)

Where were southern white people formally educated in America?

Why do some of Edward Ball’s relatives want to protect “our race”? (p. 27)
What are they telling Ball?

What are “step-asides”? (p. 278)

Why endogamy? Why is endogamy illegal in the United States today? (p. 242)

How did white southerners justify the Civil War? What is nullification? (p. 308-311)

Why was the term slave replaced by the term servant in the 19th century? (p. 328)

How is SITF a book of atonement and redemption? Should a history book attempt to do so? Why/why not?

Do you foresee a day when America has a national museum devoted to slavery? What about states having museums on slavery? Why/ why not?

This is the right place to make a plea to the families of former slave owners as well as any other collectors who continue to keep records from the plantation period. Because the lives of slaves were chronicled by their owners, not by government scribes, such private letters and papers contain the family histories of millions. They should be donated to public hands- archives, historical societies, museums, universities. -Edward Ball (p. 457)
Do you think that others will heed Ball's call? Why/why not?

Without Sanctuary- Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America

Why postcards? When does one send a postcard?

How did the nature of lynching change in the 20th century? (p. 458)

One of the most frequently asked questions about lynching is: When did it stop? (p. 457)

Lynching diminished for numerous reasons (p. 461)

A Conversation with Philip Dray

NPR and Philip Dray

What role will lynching play in studying American History in the future?

A Brief History of the United States

How does one learn about the history of African-Americans without it becoming based on victimization? Is that possible to do?

The Book Critique and Course Evaluation is due on the final exam date in May. Each paper is to be a minimum of 500 words and typed in paragraph form. I will be in my office- Room 123 in the Social Sciences building to collect the papers. Any questions, email me at pmyers@accd.edu.

1. What is the specific topic of your book? What is the book's overall purpose? Who is the intended audience? When was the book written and published? Who published the book? Where was the book published?
2. Who is the author? What qualifications does the author have to write this book? (professional, personal…)
3. Does the author state an explicit thesis? What is that thesis? Does the author provide a convincing argument to prove the thesis? How does the author attempt to do so?
4. What exactly does the work contribute to the overall topic of our course? What general problems and concepts in our course does it engage with?
5. What kinds of material does the author rely upon in writing this book? (e.g. primary documents or secondary material, literary analysis, personal observation, quantitative data, biographical or historical accounts) How is this material used to demonstrate and argue the thesis?
6. What other issues and topics does the book raise?
7. What are your own reactions and opinions regarding the work? Who would you recommend this book to?

1. Did this course meet your goals and objectives? (What were those goals and objectives?)
2. Did this course challenge you to re-consider African-American history? In what ways?
3. What were the most enjoyable aspects of the course?
4. What were the least enjoyable aspects of the course?
5. Rate the effectiveness of the three required books for the course- Many Thousands Gone, Slaves in the Family, and At the Hands of Persons Unknown? Should these three books be used in future History 2381 classes? Why/why not?
6. What book would you recommend that all students should read for this course? Why?
7. Identify TWO resources on the Web that could enhance the teaching of this course.
8. How could the instructor make this class more effective for future students?