Unit Three: A Manifest Destiny Revealed (1840 – 1877)
activity of the Underground Railroad (Norwich to Peterboro to Oswego),
local history
New York 114th infantry,
Loomis Gang, Roscoe Conkling
ch 14 pp 308-17, 331-39; ch 17; ch 18; ch 19; ch 20; ch 21; ch 22; as assigned The American Spirit
reading
Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience;
Corwin, Against the Mexican War; Olmstead, Slave Management on a Mississippi Plantation; Dew, In
Defense of Slavery; Fitzhugh, Cannibals All; Douglas, Independence Day Speech
Dred Scott Decision; Hofstadter, Abraham Lincoln and the Self-made Myth; Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Lincoln, House Divided, Cooper Union Speech, 1st Inaugural, 2nd Address to Congress, Letter to Horace
Greeley, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, 2nd Inaugural
writing
document essay – “Lincoln’s Words”; brief response; Spiral Questions
unit thematic essay – “Memory and the American Civil War”
‘Genre Painting and the (Re)Imagination of America’; ‘The Rise of American Popular Music’
looking, listening,
doing
Glory
Gettysburg
Gangs of New York
‘The Photography of Matthew Brady and Co.’
‘Lincoln’, ‘The Civil War Remakes America’, ‘Thomas Nast’
songs of the Civil War, civil war photos project
Essential
Questions
What sort of issues might a democracy/republic find unable to resolve politically?
What happens to a society when it goes to war? in the immediate? in the longer term?
Why or how does race matter in any society? What ways can a society react to racial conflict?
How is an emerging “modern” America becoming a land of machines? Why is this so?
What is the dual nature of the American relationship with immigrants?
What factors brought the nation to civil war?
Why did President Lincoln prosecute the war against the Confederacy?
questions to consider
How did President Lincoln’s views on slavery and black Americans evolve during the war?
In what ways was the Civil War a war of ‘modernity’ versus ‘anachronism’?
In what ways can the Union victory be seen as a victory of the Northern economic system?
In what ways did ‘Radical Reconstruction’ establish and advance the cause of black equality?
In what ways did ‘Radical Reconstruction’ harm and retard the cause of black equality?