Educators
This year we are excited to offer "Voices of a People's History" curriculum tool-kits to teachers who want to participate in Take a Shot at Changing the World. Each tool-kit comes in a cotton tote bag and contains:
- A 2GB carabiner flash drive pre-loaded with:
1. Standards-aligned lesson plans on themes like social and racial justice, human rights, and
democracy, divided by time period
2. Primary source material
3. E-book edition of Voices of a People's History of the United States
4. E-book edition of Teaching with Voices of a People's History
5. Public domain photographs and illustrations that can be used in students' films
- The People Speak DVD
- Abridged Teaching Edition of A People's History
To find out more or request a tool-kit, please e-mail Rachel@steeltown.org or call Steeltown at 412-251-0890
Students interested in participating in the contest will need an educator sponsor. Sponsors may choose to be involved by assigning this as a class project, overseeing a group of students, or simply serving as a point of contact for their school and assisting with uploading the finished video at the end if needed.
Students looking for content to use in their videos should visit Creative Commons to find images in the public domain.
Are you using the tool-kit in your classroom? We came up with a few prompts and ideas for films using the material; feel free to use any of these lessons with your students!
STUDENTS: As a nation, we've come a long way and enjoy many freedoms as a result of the courageous men and women who have gone before us. But we still have a long way to go. What injustices or hardships are you experiencing or witnessing in your life, school, neightborhood? Hunger? Discrimination? Opression? Violence? Bullying?Environmental abuse? How can you make a difference?
- Martin Luther King (Segregation)
THE BLACK UPSURGE AGAINST RACIAL SEGREGATION
For almost a hundred years after the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, those amendments, guaranteeing the right to vote, proclaiming equal rights for all, were left unenforced by the federal government. In short, for all that time, black people in the South were abandoned by the U.S. government, ignoring the Constitutional rights won after the Civil War. The result was disfranchisement, racial segregation, beatings, and murders.
But under the surface, there was resentment, indignation, and anger. And little forays against the system, most of them unsuccessful and unnoticed.
In 1955, this surface silence was broken with the extraordinary effort by black people in Montgomery, Alabama, to boycott the buses in that city in protest against racial segregation.
(Martin Luther King) We have known humiliation, we have known abusive language, we have been plunged into the abyss of oppression. And we decided to raise up only with the weapon of protest…We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us.
TODAY'S APPLICATION:
Does segregation or inequality still exist? How? Where? (i.e. in the classroom, in education, clubs, membership organizations)
REFERENCES:
Voices of a People's History - Chapter 17
- Susan B. Anthony
THE EARLY WOMEN'S MOVEMENT (Right to Vote)
…the brave actions of women who dared to speak out against oppression in the early nineteenth century.
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote,” and found guilty. Who would have thought that those committed to the early women’s movement were but the first of several generations of brave women to fight against economic exploitation as well as physical, social, and racial inequality?
The road to the franchise was long and strewn with difficult and often dangerous obstacles. But women persevered. They continued to use their voices to demonstrate that they would not be deterred from achieving their goals.
(Susan B. Anthony) Your denial of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an offender against law; therefore, the denial of my sacred right to life, liberty, property and— [the pursuit of happiness]
TODAY'S APPLICATION:
Is there still inequality for women in certain sectors?
Oppression pertaining to a particular class, race, religious or political conviction, gender, age, etc.
REFERENCE:
Voices of a People's History - Chapter 6
- Rachel Carson (Environmental movement)
(Rachel Carson)We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth super highway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one “less travelled by” — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make.
TODAY'S APPLICATION:
Environmental conservation - How can we use the earth's resources more efficiently?
Pollution - Air, Land, or Water.
RESOURCE:
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
- Tecumseh (Native American Indian)
INDIAN REMOVAL
The defeat of England in the American Revolution paved the way for the colonists to move westward into Indian territory, because the British had proclaimed in 1763 that they could not settle land beyond a certain line at the Appalachian Mountains.
Thus, by 1840, out of a population in the United States of 13 million, 4,500,000 had crossed the mountains into the Mississippi Valley—that huge expanse of land crisscrossed by rivers flowing into the Mississippi from east and west. In 1820, 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi. By 1844, fewer than 30,000 were left. Most of them had been killed or pushed westward by force. It was an early example of what in the late twentieth century, referring to other countries, would be called “ethnic cleansing.”
One of the great figures of early Native resistance to colonization was Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader, who earned a reputation for his skills in fighting white settlers and militias in the Midwest.
Tecumseh’s Speech to the Osages (Winter 1811–12)1
Brothers,—We are friends; we must assist each other to bear our burdens. The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground, to satisfy the avarice of the white men. We, ourselves, are threatened with a great evil; nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men.
TODAY'S APPLICATION:
Violation of one's constitutional rights/equality for ALL
Oppression of a certain race or class
REFERENCE:
Voices of a People's History - Chapter 7
- Henry George (Poverty)
Henry George was an itinerant typesetter and newspaper editor who became a skilled lecturer and critic of the economic system. His book Progress and Poverty made him famous, and he ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor of New York several times in the 1880s and 1890s. In this address, delivered in an opera house in Burlington, Iowa, George examines the social roots of poverty in the United States in the nineteenth century, challenging the myth of individual blame.
Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty” (April 1, 1885)1
I propose to talk to you tonight of the Crime of Poverty. I cannot, in a short time, hope to convince you of much; but the thing of things I should like to show you is that poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty, I look upon, not as a criminal in himself, so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well perhaps as himself, are responsible. That poverty is a curse, the bitterest of curses, we all know...
The curse born of poverty is not confined to the poor alone; it runs through all classes, even to the very rich. They, too, suffer; they must suffer; for there cannot be suffering in a community from which any class can totally escape. The vice, the crime, the ignorance, the meanness born of poverty, poison, so to speak, the very air which rich and poor alike must breathe...
. . . . And it seems to me clear that the great majority of those who suffer from poverty are poor not from their own particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by society at large. Therefore I hold that poverty is a crime—not an individual crime, but a social crime, a crime for which we all, poor as well as rich, are responsible. . . .
TODAY'S APPLICATION:
What are the effects of poverty today as seen in our neighborhoods (i.e. abandoned houses, inequality in public education, drugs, violence)
Hunger
The Homeless population
REFERENCE:
Voices of a People's History - Chapter 11
Check out these helpful resources for teachers:
- Allegheny Intermediate Unit: Provides educational services and support to regional schools
- Voices of a People's History: Educates and inspires a new generation working for social justice by giving public expression to rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past and present.
- Heinz History Center: opportunities for teachers, including workshops, teaching primary sources, and subject based curriculum
- PBS Program on teaching digital media in the classroom
Please contact Rachel Shepherd at Rachel@steeltown.org, or call 412-251-0890 if you're interested in finding out more or scheduling a classroom visit to talk to your students about the contest.
Steeltown Entertainment Project
"Take A Shot Contest"
2100 Wharton Street
Suite 708
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
