Lessons in American History Using Primary Sources
A Series of Webquests
By Laura Thompson
UPS 4: Minorities Prior to WWI
Historical Context – The ideal of the American
Revolution included "the proposition that all men are created
equal." But were they?
Driving
Question: What were the advantages to keeping people disenfranchised and/or
separate from the majority?
Part A |
The following documents present information about the
treatment of minorities in America prior to the First World War. Examine each
document carefully. In the space provided, answer the question or questions
that follow each document. |
Document
1 - George Bourne, Slavery
Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women (1837)—Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress. (available at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6726/).
African-American women held as slaves were particularly vulnerable to abuse at
the hands of their white owners. This engraving appeared in abolitionist George
Bourne’s Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women, published in
1837. It highlighted the connections between the anti-slavery and women’s
rights movements, as some women abolitionists, such as Sarah and Angelina
Grimke, used the anti-slavery cause to address their own plight as women. The
connections they drew were highly controversial, and many anti-slavery
organizations were split over the issue of women’s rights.
Describe some
of the important elements in the picture above. Explain what message the artist
was trying to convey.
Document
2 - Photograph by L. Horgan, Jr, George Meadows, Lynching victim, Jefferson County Alabama
January 15, 1889 (available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lynching-1889.jpg).
George Meadows was lynched in Jefferson
County, Alabama on January 15, 1889. In 1908, the year that the town of
Allensworth was founded, there were 97 lynchings recorded in the United States,
89 of them African Americans.
Explain the
power of violence and terror used by groups like the KKK.
Document
3 - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/chief_joseph.html#ixzz1OnLmMmeZ
.In his last years
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce spoke eloquently against the
injustice of United States policy toward his people and held out the hope that
America's promise of freedom and equality might one day be fulfilled for Native
Americans as well. An indomitable voice of conscience for the West, he died in
1904, still in exile from his homeland, according to his doctor "of a
broken heart."
“Governor Isaac Stevens of the Washington Territory said there
were a great many white people in our country, and many more would come; that
he wanted the land marked out so that the Indians and the white man could be
separated.” |
Why would
people in positions of power, like Governor Stevens, want to keep Native
Americans separate from other citizens?
Document
4 - http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/17/no-irish-need-invent-urban-legends-about-no-irish-need-apply-signs/.
The illustration is the cover of a
Harper’s weekly, a national magazine. The picture attempts to make a statement
about two races, African Americans and Irish Americans.
Describe some
of the important elements in the picture above. Explain what message the artist
was trying to convey.
Document
5 - http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/07/11/the-white-womans-burden/.
This illustration shows contemporary views of races as “the white man’s
burden.”
Describe some
of the important elements in the picture above. Explain what message the artist
was trying to convey.
Document
6 - Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (2nd ed.), John Murray, 1882. In this book Darwin described how medical advances meant that the
weaker were able to survive and have families, and commented on the effects of
this, while cautioning that hard reason should not override sympathy, and
considering how other factors might reduce the effect:
Thus the weak members
of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to
the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly
directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the
case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst
animals to breed. The aid which
we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of
the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social
instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated,
more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even
at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of
our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation,
for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were
intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless; it could only be for a
contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. ... We must therefore
bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their
kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely
that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the
sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or
mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than
expected |
Explain how
Darwin's Theory of Evolution
was used to explain man's treatment of man.
Part B |
If all men are created equal, how is it that the US
government passed laws that discriminated or denied those rights to minority
groups? |