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| Daily Lives of Slaves - What Really Happened? |
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Author: Wendy Schanberger, Hereford Middle School, Baltimore County Public Schools
Grade Level: Middle/High
Duration: 2 periods |
Overview:
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Thanks to the Depression-era Federal Writers' Project, over 2000 ex-slave
narratives have been preserved to help us discover what African-American slaves'
lives were like. But as with all historical sources, the reliability of those
narratives is partly open to question. For one thing, many of the subjects were
elderly at the time of the project, and so their remembrances may have changed
or faded over time. Secondly, there are the biases of the white interviewers that
should be taken into account. This lesson uses the ex-slave narratives and other
primary sources like photographs and advertisements to explore the varieties of
slave life in antebellum America. Using those sources, students will learn about
the relationships between masters, overseers, and plantation hands. They will
also recognize the conflicts between different groups of slaves, such as the field
workers and the house servants. Learning to "read" photographs and
other images will also teach students how to glean historical information from
visual sources. In the process, they will come to understand that all sources
contain certain biases, and an understanding of history comes from interweaving
a variety of documents from the past.
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