Flesh and Blood and Chains and Guns and Ink and Cancer and Cotton…
It’s my general opinion that a great challenge of teaching history is that the farther back in time something occurs the harder it can be for students to think of it in color. I mean this both figuratively and literally; in the figurative sense older historical events and personalities often feel washed out, flattened, abstracted, irrelevant to students’ lives and therefore of lower cognitive priority. But in a literal sense it is also important to fight against the temptation to see all the events from before the 1930s in black and white — particularly, the black and white of letters on paper. To that end, when dealing with a topic like Reconstruction, it’s important to give students a variety of multimedia resources which they can use to fight against the natural impulse to see these events as sepia-toned antiques.
Crash Course U.S. History Video: Reconstruction
I’ve mentioned this video before in these blogs, but I want to emphasize something else important about it as part of this multimedia set. Namely, its color, pace, and vibrancy. This is a useful media tool not just because it offers a brief but thorough outline of Reconstruction to students, but because it does so in a way that is so far removed from the same blurry black-and-white lithographs that students have been glazing past in their textbooks for decades. Although I have some reservations about Crash Course videos in general (they can move a little too quickly for students to keep up), I would definitely use this one in a Reconstruction unit, maybe as part of an individualized learning lesson in which students could watch or re-watch on Chromebooks at their own pace.
Image of a Man Receiving a Wellness Check in the Mississippi Delta, 2017
Again, these images are here to militate against seeing Reconstruction and its legacy as irrelevant, stale, or faded. Placing this image of a man living in difficult conditions along with a brief link to the article describing cancer clusters in the Mississippi Delta gives students something to connect with immediately (how much of the article to be used could be adjusted based on lesson plan/time constraints). They know (or will learn) that one of Reconstruction’s aims was a fundamental reorganizing of the South into a racially equitable society. They know (or will learn) that it failed to accomplish this goal. How does this image relate to that? How might things have been different if Reconstruction had succeeded? Might this man’s life have been improved? How?
Map Displaying Agricultural Production and Slavery Concentration in the South, 1860
To bring it back to the historical content area, here’s a map showing the distribution of enslaved people as percentages of the population across the South in 1860 as well as the areas where certain cash crops were most closely concentrated. How does this information chime with poverty in places like the Delta today? What would the (white) owners of that incredibly valuable land have done to keep control of it and of the workforce they needed to make it profitable? How might society have changed if the freedmen really had been given effective custody of that land? Frontloading would be important with this map, since it can seem complicated at first glance — reviewing the kinds of tables used here and refreshing students on map literacy fundamentals would be helpful to set them up for success.
Howard University Video Highlighting the Biology Department
A useful counterpoint to the kind of stereotypes of black poverty that are so often emphasized to the point of excluding all other narratives. This video from Howard University (founded during Reconstruction with an explicit mission of fostering black leadership and black academic excellence) gives students something more positive to grapple with. What parts of Reconstruction does an institution like Howard represent? This video or others like it could be a good resource if students were engaging in a classroom debate over the conflicting visions of black uplift held by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.
I’ve given traditional woodcuts and cartoons a bad rap in this blog so far, and it is true in my opinion that they can sometimes be overused or oversaturated in traditional history textbooks and text sets. But that isn’t at all to say that they’re without value. This woodcut of the Battle of Liberty Place (1874) in New Orleans, perpetrated by the Crescent City White League against the democratically elected mixed-race government, is useful both as a content education resource itself and as an opportunity for textual analysis. Students can be asked both about the engraving itself (How many people are involved here? What kind of weapons or uniforms do you see? What’s the scale of this event) and encouraged to dive deeper into the broader context (who might have published this illustration, and for what reason? Does the engraving seem biased or slanted one way or another?). Time permitting, this engraving could be accompanied by a picture of the only recently-removed memorial in New Orleans which praised the white supremacist mob shown here as guardians of liberty. What motivations would have been shared between those pictured here and those who erected and maintained a monument to their actions for decades?
