Slavery Assessment

Your assessment for our unit on the Abolition Movement is an in-class essay. Preparation is key--prep any notes, look over materials, pull quotes, and/or create an outline.

Reminder about integrating and setting up quotes in writing:

When integrating quotes into a piece of writing, you need to

• set-up your quote
• use quotation marks
• include page number/author and then
• explain 

Look at the handout for more detail/examples.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

"I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations."

Today we examine Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative, and we will read a few excerpts from that novel. Some information about her from the great website harrietjacobs.org:

After nearly seven years hiding in a tiny garret above her grandmother’s home, Harriet Ann Jacobs took a step other slaves dared to dream in 1842; she secretly boarded a boat in Edenton, N.C., bound for Philadelphia, New York and, eventually, freedom. The young slave woman’s flight, and the events leading up to it, are documented in heart-wrenching detail in her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, self-published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent.
A significant personal history by an African American woman, Harriet Jacobs’ story is as remarkable as the writer who tells it. During a time when it was unusual for slaves to read and write, self-publishing a first-hand account of slavery’s atrocities was extraordinary. That it was written by a woman, unprecedented.

Here are guiding questions as we read this book! Remember to always point to specifics when answering questions. Pull quotes!

In addition, you are responsible for the readings about the Fugitive Slave Law (and the questions that go along with them).

Frederick Douglass

Today we look at the one and only Frederick Douglass. We'll watch parts of When the Lion Wrote History and answer some questions. We'll also read a  couple things: Excerpt of "My Bondage, My Freedom" as well as a speech from Douglass titled "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro."

Abolitionist Movement

Background of the Civil War: Events, Trends, and Important People

Our next unit looks at our country as we headed towards The Civil War. Check out our schedule, as well as a PowerPoint on the Abolitionist Movement.

We'll also tackle some primary source readings ("The Abolitionist Crusade") and answer some questions.

Make sure to read chapter 19 in Pageant, and take notes...quiz on Monday.

Project Presentations

Before we jump in, a word about your Transcendentalism responses...

Then: Presentations!

American Romanticism: Poetry

• Fireside Poets
• Remember, Americans are still trying to find their "voice." The "Fireside Poets" (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier,Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant) are among the first American poets to mimic the European style, while still making their work their own
• Analysis: "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant
• Analyzing Poetry Handout

• Emily Dickinson
• From PoetryFoundation.org: Emily Dickinson is one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time. She took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,Henry David Thoreau, andWalt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. Like writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized. Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works she knew well, she saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded. The literary marketplace, however, offered new ground for her work in the last decade of the 19th century. When the first volume of her poetry was published in 1890, four years after her death, it met with stunning success. Going through eleven editions in less than two years, the poems eventually extended far beyond their first household audiences.

"Nature," "Self-Reliance," and Thoreau

• Discussion of Emerson
• Thoreau and Walden
• For two years (1845-1847) Thoreau lived alone in a cabin he built himself at Walden Pond outside of Concord. His experiences during this time provided him with the material for his masterwork, Walden (1854).
• Condensing his experiences at Walden Pond into one year, Thoreau used the four seasons as a structural framework for the book.
• A unique blend of natural observation, social criticism, and philosophical insight, Walden is now generally regarded as the supreme work of Transcendentalist literature.
• His work has inspired writers, environmentalists, and social and political leaders. It has made generations of readers aware of the possibilities of the human spirit and the limitations of society.
• Walden Quotes: What is Thoreau saying? What philosophical elements of Transcendentalism can we pull from these quotes?
• Thoreau and "Civil Disobedience"
• Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is a symbolic or ritualistic violation of the law, rather than a rejection of the system as a whole.
• Some condensed quotes
• Transcendentalism Open Response
• Construct an open response to Transcendentalism to demonstrate your understanding of this philosophy. What are the core values and beliefs of the movement? How is it relevant? Where do we see the key ideas of Emerson and Thoreau in contemporary society?

American Hero and Transcendentalism

Agenda:

• Discussion of "A Rescue"
• How does the Deerslayer set the stage for the concept of the American Hero? Check out the heroic qualities in action in the trailer for the film adaptation of Cooper's Last of the Mohicans..
• History themes
• Transcendentalism
• Accessing prior knowledge/Connections: Discussion
• What is Transcendentalism? Notes.
• Read: "Self Reliance" and "Nature" Take a stab at the questions for the two pieces--but don't freak out if you cannot answer them all--just try. Trust your gut.

Is American Literature Possible?

Finish up Summer Reading presentations; what do we get from the reading?

Review of history terms, as well as literary terms (tools for analyzing literature).

Discussion: Is American Literature possible? Could literature and art thrive in this new nation? Were literature and art possible in the special political, social and economic conditions Americans created? How could the language and literary models of England be naturalized to the conditions of America?

This is what we will explore today, as we read some introductory notes on American Romanticism, and dive into some James Fenimore Cooper with an excerpt from The Deerslayer. To set up this excerpt: As this scene opens, Natty Bumppo -- known as Deerslayer to his Native American friends -- has been taken captive by the Hurons, allies of the French and sworn enemies of Deerslayer’s (and England’s) friends, the Delawares. Hist, a Delaware female who just happens to be in love with Deerslayer’s buddy, Chingachgook, has also been taken captive, as have two white women, Judith and her sister Hetty.