Reconstruction 360

Reconstruction 360 uses a 360 degree video platform as a storytelling device that lets the audience step inside pivotal Reconstruction events.

Reconstruction 360 uses a 360 degree video platform as a storytelling device that lets the audience step inside pivotal Reconstruction events. By clicking on icons within the 360 video the user can access short documentaries that offer the perspectives of multiple characters. Reconstruction 360 also includes lesson plans, primary documents, and curriculum standards.

Teaching Ourselves

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A fugitive slave and an abolitionist, Frederick Douglass sailed to Britain in 1845 and stayed for 19 months. He was a powerful orator, and his antislavery speeches attracted huge crowds...
Teaching Ourselves

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The American Missionary Society and other private benevolent societies from the North helped to establish more than five hundred schools and colleges for formerly enslaved people in the South...
Teaching Ourselves

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On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making him a symbol of Black freedom for years to come. As the war dragged on he began to recruit Blacks, free and enslaved, to the...
Teaching Ourselves

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The school's new teacher has recently finished her training and this is her first teaching assignment. Black men and women were eager to teach in schools for freedpeople, and African American...
The Black Codes

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The Black man in this jail cell has been locked up for refusing to sign a labor contract. Under the Black Codes he is considered a vagrant. Freedpeople had to sign labor contracts to work for whites...
The Black Codes

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The growth of Black Codes in the South made it clear that freedpeople needed the support and protection of the federal government. On March 3, 1865 Congress established the Bureau of Refugees...
The Black Codes

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The wife of the jailed freedman has come to the jail to support her husband in his contract dispute with the white landowner. In 1865 and 1866, following the example of Northern Blacks, freedpeople in...
The Black Codes

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There was little or no universal or public education in the Antebellum South. Only wealthy elites went to school, and most poor whites were illiterate. They remained ignorant of politics at the...
The Black Codes

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The Freedmen’s Bureau helped create labor contracts that were supposed to be fair to both parties, but in many cases established conditions not much better than slavery. This system became known as...
The Black Codes

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Like most former Confederates, this landowner resents the authority of U.S. Army officers and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Fearful that their agricultural economy would collapse without the free labor of...