The African-American Experience

The African-American Experience

1619 Project

Video and Discussion

Prologue, Many
Thousands Gone
The 1619 Project
The 1619 Project
Trump Administration’s
Response
Trump Administration’s
Response
Slavery and Poor Whites
General impressions?

https://docs.google.com/document/
d/1GtAgTKvosKHcivp0YNVtPBAsg
g5jWHuo/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/
d/1GtAgTKvosKHcivp0YNVtPBAsg
g5jWHuo/edit
1. What is the difference
between a social
construction and a historical
construction?
2. What does it mean to
say that slavery was “a
negotiated relationship?”
3. What error of historical
scholarship about slavery
is this work trying to
correct?
4. “If slavery made race, its
larger purpose was to make
class, and the fact that the
two were made
simultaneously by the same
process has mystified
both.” What does this
quotation mean?
5. How did slavery
evolve differently
in different parts
of the country?
6. What is the
difference between
societies with slaves
and slave societies?
7. How did
societies with
slaves become
slave societies?
8. How did
slaveholders solidify
their rule in the
South?
9. What was “the
driving force behind the
evolution of slavery” in
the United States? Why
is it so important?
10. What is the second,
powerful marker in the
evolution of slavery
mentioned here? Why is it
so important?
1. How was slavery in
the American
colonies and in the
United States
different from
slavery in other
civilizations?
2. What were two historical
forces that fuelled slavery
in the colonies and the
United States? Think about
when slavery started to
appear and what else was
happening in the world at
that time.
3. What social, cultural, and
economic experiences might
have educated people towards
a system of slavery like the
one that appeared in the
United States? What cultural
practices might have later
been applied to the system of
slavery?
5. Did people who were
enslaved in the colonies and
in the US resist their
condition and their
treatment? What forms
might this resistance have
taken? What lessons might
this resistance teach us?
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 27
https://freedomonthemove.org/
Maroons
Conley, Dorothy L., and Dorothy R. Conley. “Origin of the Negro Spirituals.” Negro History Bulletin 25, no. 8 (1962):
179–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44215758.
Conclusion
What did men and women who were enslaved
say of their experience? What examples do you
know of?

How might Southerners have attempted to

dismantle the Underground Railroad?

How might these actions have led to even

greater tension between North and South?