Material Culture
An excellent preparation for using such sources is a trip to the fine list of online sources for “Material Culture in the Classroom,” at this website created by the “Bozeman Teaching American History” project at Montana State University:
http://www.bozeman.k12.mt.us/history/docs/MaterialCultureClassroom.doc
There are two good website pages on the New York African Burial Ground. This one from the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/protest_reform/
slave_island_02.shtml
And this one from the “Slavery in America” website, which also provides a lesson plan associated with the essay:
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_burial_ground.htm
Gabriel's Rebellion
You and your students may also want to read Douglas Egerton’s book-length study: Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
And this website from PBS offers a good brief treatment of the subject:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
part3/3p1576.html
For Poplar Forest, link to the “Archaeology” section of the
Poplar Forest Plantation Website for more details on the excavations and
their implications for the history of slaves and slavery:
http://www.poplarforest.org/ARCH/archcommunity.html
Poplar Forest, of course, was only one of Jefferson’s plantations,
and the “Plantation Life and Slavery” section of the website
for his home, Monticello, provides more useful material about the material
culture and history of slave life:
http://www.monticello.org/reports/
index.html#plantation
The website on the reconstruction of Williamsburg, Virginia’s colonial
capital, is also a good source of information on material culture and
life under the slave system. If your computer will support the download,
look at Colonial Williamsburg’s “Day in the Life” series,
which provides a wealth of material for discussions on material culture
from the Williamsburg reconstruction:
http://www.history.org/History/teaching/
Dayseries/ditl_index.cfm
Look, as well, at this “Scrapbook” of eighteenth-century African
American clothing from Colonial Williamsburg:
http://www.history.org/history/clothing/intro/aa_cover.cfm
The “African-Americans” section of Williamsburg’s “Meet
the People” segment is a rich resource on the eighteenth century,
geared to classroom needs:
http://www.history.org/Almanack/people/african/aahdr.cfm
In fact, you may want to bookmark Colonial Williamsburg’s “Teacher
Resources” section for future reference:
http://www.history.org/history/teaching/index.cfm
This page on Herbert Aptheker from the website of “Education on
the Internet and Teaching History on Line” will give students some
idea of the range of Aptheker’s interests, as well as a good reading
list of his works on both slave and free African Americans:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/HISaptheker.htm
For a useful source on the history and use of slave badges, see this book,
which also provides a good collection of the images of these symbols:
Greene, Harlan et al. Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston,
South Carolina,1783-1865 (Jefferson, NC.: McFarland and Company,
2003).
