SLSA TEACHING WEBSITES
**PLEASE KEEP CHECKING THIS PAGE. WE WILL ADD SITES AS WE FIND THEM
GENERAL LABOR HISTORY:
The Civic Education Consortium: This is a program of the School of Government that provides free lesson plans and training to middle and high school teachers from across the state on a variety of topics (ranging from history to current events to conflict resolution and classroom management.)
History Matters: It has over a thousand US history primary source websites linked with content details and organized into categories. Rather than continue to update the site, the editors published a book titled U.S. History Matters (Bedford, 2nd edition, 2009) describing the best 250 primary source sites.
Labor and Working Class History Association
Wisconsin Labor History Society: Included in the Lessons in Labor History, you will also find ten sample lesson plans focusing on Wisconsin Labor History, but with relevance for other aspects of labor history. These sample lesson plans include primary source materials, as well as plans for their use. These sample lesson plans, with documents, were prepared by a subcommittee of the Wisconsin Labor History.
Women Working, 1830-1930: This is a digital exploration of women’s impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University. The link provided is to the Teacher Resources Section.
The Zinn Project: Dedicated to putting women, minorities, and working people into the historical narrative. Very little on the site deals with Southern Labor, but go to the link and look at the lesson on the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.
SOUTHERN LABOR HISTORY:
After Slavery Project: The Online Classroom section makes available a wealth of documents and essays illustrating the often violent confluence of race, labor, and politics in the post-emancipation Carolinas. In addition, each teaching unit is accompanied by suggested readings and questions that can be used to promote student discussion. The Online Library provides a still-growing bibliography of scholarly works on race, labor, and politics in the era of emancipation and after.
America’s Reconstruction: The text is by Eric Foner, and it has a great section on “From Slave Labor to Free Labor.”
Documenting the American South: Classroom Resources
This page is designed to highlight the rich educational resources available through DocSouth. We invite students and educators alike to explore and contribute to the development of these pages by sharing what they discover, learn, and teach. There’s lots of material here relevant to southern labor history, including lesson plans and sources for classes on child labor, slavery, and labor unions.
Freedmen & Southern Society Project: The sample documents include a number that illuminate an often violent struggle over the terms of the free-labor system that would replace slavery in the post-Civil War south.
Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Textile Mill World
This site was created by Dr. James Leloudis and Dr. Kathryn Walbert as a part of the American Historical Association‘s program Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In building this website, our intent is to make oral history resources available to teachers at the secondary and college level and to suggest some of the ways in which the stories told in Like a Family can enrich the classroom experience for U.S. History students.
Stanford History Education Group: The folks at Stanford do really good work in teaching historical thinking skills. If you go to this link and click on “Civil War and Reconstruction,” there is a good lesson on sharecropping.
Without Sanctuary: Since lynching was sometimes related to labor, this would be a good site for upper level high school students.
