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Hunter-Dunbar Expedition
This inquiry leads students through an investigation of the Hunter-Dunbar expedition, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. By investigating the compelling question “Is the Hunter-Dunbar Expedition Worth Remembering?” students evaluate the contributions Dr. George Hunter and William Dunbar made in the discovery and cataloguing of natural resources, geographic features, and Native American groups in the lower portion of the Louisiana Territory (present-day Arkansas). The formative performance tasks build on knowledge and skills through the course of the inquiry and help students draw evidence from articles, charts, graphs, and maps while justifying their reasoning in writing. Students create an evidence-based argument about whether we should remember their expedition and celebrate the accomplishments and knowledge gleaned from it.
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How Did Cotton Sow the Seeds of Panic?
This inquiry leads students through an economic investigation of the mid to late 1800s. By investigating the compelling question, “How Did Cotton Sow the Seeds of Panic?”, students identify the market forces of demand and supply at play in the boom and bust of the cotton industry. They learn how these forces impacted the treatment of enslaved persons in the United States during the lead up to The Panic of 1837. Students discover connections between technological innovations like the Cotton Gin, domestic slave trade, manufacturing of cotton in the United States and abroad and land speculation spurred on by President Andrew Jackson’s domestic policies. Students learn about the many shocks that lead to recession which can then be classified as a panic. The depth of this inquiry is in the reflection on what role reliance on enslaved people as labor played in the economic growth of the United States. This emphasizes that choices that we make as individuals and institutions can lead to the exploitation of a group or groups of individuals. This lens is vital to understanding that the choices that students make have far reaching opportunity costs.
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The Growing Crisis of Sectionalism in Antebellum America: A House Dividing
In this unit, students will trace the development of sectionalism in the United States as it was driven by the growing dependence upon, and defense of, Black slavery in the southern states. Initially seen as contrary to freedom but tolerated in order to produce the U.S. Constitution, by the 1830s the "peculiar institution" found advocates who saw it as a "positive good." Its expansion into Missouri, southern outrage over federal tariffs, and westward expansion into new territory produced a volatile and persistent debate over slavery that increasingly threatened to divide the American union. By 1860, the nation found an old Democratic Party split over the right to extend slavery into federal territory, and a new Republican Party nominating an anti-slavery, though not abolitionist, president. When Abraham Lincoln's election produced no national consensus to settle the matter of slavery's future, a southern "secession" sealed the fate of the Union.
https://edsitement.neh.gov/curricula/growing-crisis-sectionalism-antebellum-america-house-dividing |
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Why would African American activists think negatively about their allies during the antebellum period?
In this inquiry students will be reading Frederick Douglass's speech What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July and Sojourner Truth's speech Ain't I a Woman. They will have to answer following questions with the readings and think of how African Americans thought of their white allies.
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Manifest Destiny
The United States vastly expanded its territory in the 1840s. In this Opening Up the Textbook (OUT) lesson, students examine a present-day textbook passage and four nineteenth-century sources to explore what motivated American territorial expansion at the time.
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Why did Texans revolt against the Mexican government?
In this lesson, students read the Texas Declaration of Independence, military commander letters, and an abolitionist pamphlet to explore causes of the Texas Revolution.
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