Some of what set my class and me down this road

Required Reading for the Lincoln/Django (Antebellum/Civil War Era) unit

These are the resources that I proposed as background for my Cyberdemocracy class because the films and the public & scholarly reactions seemed to cross all boundaries of the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, Facebook, etc.

I delayed sharing this set of resources because of additional discussion with colleagues, as well as some personal angst over my initial direction with this unit. I think all this side discussion has settled down some, and a few alert students have taken matters into their own hands on their own class blogs! Good for them!

Overall background: Movies, History, & Politics/Government Overlap!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/movies/lincoln-django-unchained-and-an-obama-inflected-cinema.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/movies/awardsseason/black-characters-are-still-too-good-too-bad-or-invisible.html?hpw&_r=0

Django:

Reactions from scholars:
http://www.notevenpast.org/watch/quentin-tarantinos-django-unchained

http://io9.com/5971780/django-unchained-what-kind-of-fantasy-is-this

Popular (non-scholarly) views & reactions:
http://mije.org/richardprince/mayor-outraged-police-diss-newspaper#Django

Lincoln:

Historian response and reactions:
http://www.notevenpast.org/watch/historian-views-spielbergs-lincoln

http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2012/11/historians-respond-to-spielbergs-lincoln.html

Great "roundtable" discussion with diverse views:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/category/lincoln-roundtable/

Being Your Own Historian: Primary Sources of the Period

Discussion of Civil War artifacts (great links in the article)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/arts/design/photographic-artifacts-of-black-civil-war-troops.html

The Emancipation Proclamation
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

Slave Narratives (via the Library of Congress):

NOTE: This material can be overwhelming in terms of both quantity and depth. So just familiarize yourself with how the primary materials and background are laid out at each link. Perhaps read ONE narrative of your choice and listen to ONE audio of your choice. This will be enough to tackle our follow-up activities.

Texts and background discussion at:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snintro00.html

and related links at:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snrelated.html

and audio at:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices/index.html