What is the significance of bacon rebellion according to zinn

Interactive activity introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U. Roles available in Spanish. By Gilda L. Reflections on teaching students about the walkouts by Chicano students in California.

A role play on the history of the Vietnam War that is left out of traditional textbooks. By Bill Bigelow and Linda Christensen. Empathy, or "social imagination," allows students to connect to "the other" with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common. Rethinking the U. By Bob Peterson. A role play on the Constitutional Convention which brings to life the social forces active during and immediately following the American Revolution with focus on two key topics: suffrage and slavery.

By Doug Sherman. The author describes how he uses biographies and film to introduce students to the role of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement beyond the familiar heroes. He emphasizes the role and experiences of young people in the Movement. Click to email this to a friend Opens in new window Click to share on Pinterest Opens in new window Click to share on Twitter Opens in new window Click to share on Facebook Opens in new window.

Download to Read in Full. Related Resources. Books: Non-Fiction. Book - Non-fiction. Edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Teaching Guides. It began with the war against Spain in and continued with the suppression of the Philippine rebellion and their war for independence. It then continued in Haiti, Nicaragua, throughout the Caribbean.

What was going on there? It started with the march across the continent, with the seizing of Indian lands. It started with one of the major ethnic cleansings, to use a current expression, of modern history—the taking away from the Indians of this enormous expanse of territory and turning that land over to white Americans who were moving west-ward from the Atlantic Ocean.

The war with Mexico was part of that expansion. With the country now so large, and with industries turning out goods for which the domestic market was insufficient, and where there was a greater demand for the raw materials possessed by other countries, U. It was so close, and there was a good excuse—that Spain was occupying Cuba.

Of course, there is a half truth to it in that the Spanish were cruel occupiers of Cuba. Spain was gone. The United States and American corporations were in. United Fruit was in. American banks were in. American railroads were in. And the United States wrote parts of the Cuban constitution, giving it the right to intervene militarily in Cuba anytime. This was the beginning of overseas expansion by the United States. At the very end of the war in Cuba, the United States turned its attention to the Philippines.

While the war in Cuba is given a lot of attention in American history books, with a kind of romantic attention to Theodore Roosevelt marching up San Juan Hill and the Rough Riders and all that, the Philippine War is barely mentioned.

Yet the Spanish- American War lasted three months, and the Philippine War lasted for years and years. And it was a bloody war in which at least half a million Filipinos died. The war in the Philippines was in many ways a preview of the Vietnam War. Here was the United States sending an army and navy halfway around the world to subdue a local population.

President McKinley explained his decision to take over the Philippines by saying that he got down on his knees and prayed to God to tell him what to do about the Philippines and God told him that it was his duty to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos. The Filipinos, of course, got a different message from God. Suarez: What happened in the Tulsa Race Riot? And maybe you could also tell me what life was like for Black people in places like Oklahoma at that time. The Tulsa Race Riot is one of those events like so many—very dramatic, very important, and yet somehow not mentioned in traditional histories.

The memory of it was actually wiped out. There had been another really deadly attack against Blacks in East St. Louis in , but after the war, there were many such riots all over the country.

They usually started with one incident that fueled anger and hysteria. In this case, a Black kid in Tulsa was accused of molesting a white woman. It was very unclear whether this had really happened or not, but a number of Black people gathered around where this kid was being held to protect him from lynching.

They were armed, because they expected trouble. And essentially the Black neighborhood in Tulsa was destroyed. It was really as if a war had taken place. How many people died in that riot, nobody knows exactly. Then the records were destroyed. And nobody seems to want to know about it.

These riots had a very powerful effect on the Black community. I suspect that some of the important literature and art that came out of the Black community after the war was in some way inspired and provoked by what happened. In this early period, enslavement was not an automatic condition, nor did it uniformly apply to all African and African-descended people.

Very importantly, being enslaved was not necessarily a permanent lifetime status. The boundaries between groups were more fluid but began to shift over the next few decades to make strict distinctions, which eventually became law.

By the late s, significant shifts began to happen in the colonies. As the survival of European immigrants increased, there were more demands for land and the labor needed to procure wealth. Indentured servitude lost its attractiveness as it became economically less profitable to utilize servants of European descent.

White settlers began to turn to slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies. African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills.

Characterizations of Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor. Indenture was a means for mainly English and Irish people who could not afford passage to the British colonies to enter into a labor contract.

They would sell their labor for a term, generally years. Upon the completion of their indenture, the person was to be given land to begin a life. Indentured servitude was hard, and many laborers did not survive their contract term and subsequently did not receive their land. For planters, indentured servants were economically more optimal in the early colonial period. Labor status was not permanent nor solely connected to race.

A significant turning point came in when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the status of the child.

In , the last of the religious conditions that placed limits on servitude was erased by another Virginia law. This new law deemed it legal to keep enslaved people in bondage even if they converted to Christianity. With this decree, the justification for black servitude changed from a religious status to a designation based on race.

Chattel slavery was a form of slavery in the U. Before , in English common law, the legal status of children followed the status of the father. In the colonies, this doctrine followed the colonists. Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman sued for her freedom in Virginia on the basis that her father was white.

The court granted freedom to her and her child in In response to this case, Virginia instituted partus sequitur ventrem making children's legal status follow the mother.

Elite colonists determined that they needed to amass more native lands for their continued expansion, to pacify poor European colonists who sought economic advancement, and to keep a dedicated labor force to do the grueling agricultural work.

By the mids, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor, and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity. The Africans physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position. To further separate the social and legal connections between lower-class whites and African laborers enslaved or free , laws were put into place to control the interaction between the two groups.

These laws created a hierarchy based on race. After the Revolution, the U. Constitution strongly encoded the protection of property within its words. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the socially protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness.

The question s of who could - and can - claim the unalienable rights has been a question for America through time. After prevailing in the American Revolution, our founders created the U.

Constitution, which contains strongly-worded property rights. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the legally protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question s of who could - and can - claim unalienable rights has been an American debate since our inception.

America would come to be defined by the language of freedom and the acceptance of slavery. Along with the revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality, slavery concerns began to surface as black colonists embraced the meaning of freedom, and the British abolished slavery within their lands. The fledgling United States sought to establish itself and had to wrestle with the tension borne from the paradox of liberty.

It became necessary to develop new rationales and arguments to defend the institution of slavery. How does one justify holding a human as property? Major political leaders and thinkers of American history promoted theories of difference and degeneracy about nonwhite people that grew in the lateth century. Their support of inferior races justified the dispossession of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans in the era of revolution.

It was this racial ideology that formed the foundation for the continuation of American chattel slavery and the further entrenchment of anti-blackness. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture. The successful American Revolution and the new Constitution resulted in fierce debates about the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom.

However, the nation did not end slavery nor the uses of racial ideology to separate groups, choosing to maintain the existing hierarchy. Boosted by the Louisiana Purchase, cotton agriculture made profitable by the invention of the cotton gin , and seized American Indian lands, a new internal slave trade reinvigorated slavery, justified by 19th-century pseudo-scientific racist ideas.

How did the revolutionary ideas of equality and rights of man also harden ideas of race? Scientists argued that Africans and their descendants were inferior - either a degenerate type of being or a completely separate type of being altogether, suitable for perpetual service. Like the European scholars before them, American intellectuals organized humans by category, seeking differences between racial populations.

The work of Dr. Samuel Morton is infamous for his measurements of skulls across populations. He concluded that African people had smaller skulls and were therefore not as intelligent as others. Both Nott and Agassiz concluded that Africans were a separate species.

This information spread into popular thought and culture and served to dehumanize African-descended people further while fueling anti-black sentiment. Nott and Geo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.