Elizabeth Sirimarco – författare

In 1619, Dutch traders sold twenty Africans to English settlers for the purposes of slave labor. By the late seventeenth century, enslaved Africans would become the primary source of labor in America, especially in the South. While the North relied more on technology after the Industrial Revolution, the Southern economy was based on agriculture. Despite the aversion of many Northerners to slavery after the American Revolution, the demand for cotton and tobacco in the North kept slavery, on which the antebellum Southern economy was based, alive. Students will read accounts about the lives of those enslaved laborers. Through primary sources, they''ll also learn about the laws designed to protect the institution of slavery and how the institution was dismantled.

When most Americans think of the civil rights movement, they think of the organized struggle for equality in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the civil rights movement actually has its roots in the Reconstruction era of the late nineteenth century as the country tried to rebuild itself after the Civil War. In this book, students will read accounts from early civil rights activists and leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Booker T. Washington, as well as from mainstays of the later movement like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Other primary sources, such as poems and Supreme Court decisions, fill in the details about the fight against racial injustice in the United States. Students will gain a better understanding of the long road to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation.