Race and Ethnicity in the United States

Units

1. 1

   Slavery and the making of race

   3 lessons

   1. Colonial slavery and the invention of raceExplain how Virginia's laws from the 1640s to 1705 turned unfree labor into hereditary racial slavery, read the growth of the enslaved share of the population, and state Edmund Morgan's account of Bacon's Rebellion.
   2. The cotton kingdom and the internal slave tradeExplain how the cotton gin, the 1808 end of the Atlantic trade and the internal slave trade moved about a million people from the Upper South to the Deep South, and read the growth of the enslaved population and cotton output.
   3. Enslaved life and resistanceDescribe enslaved people's family and community life, name the major revolts and acts of resistance, trace escape routes north, and follow Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.
2. 2

   Emancipation, Reconstruction and Jim Crow

   3 lessons

   1. Civil War and emancipationExplain how emancipation became a Union war aim, state what the Emancipation Proclamation did and did not do, describe the role of Black soldiers, and trace the Thirteenth Amendment.
   2. Reconstruction and its overthrowDescribe the Freedmen's Bureau, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Black political participation, explain how violence and politics ended Reconstruction state by state, and state what the compromise of 1877 did.
   3. Jim Crow, lynching and Plessy v. FergusonDescribe how segregation and disfranchisement were written into Southern law, explain the Plessy decision of 1896, and read Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching data and Louisiana's collapse in Black registration.
3. 3

   The Great Migration and the civil rights movement

   3 lessons

   1. The Great MigrationDescribe the movement of about six million Black southerners to northern and western cities from 1916 to 1970, explain its push and pull causes, and read the growth of Black Chicago and Detroit.
   2. Brown v. Board and the Montgomery bus boycottTrace the NAACP's legal campaign to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, explain the decision and its limits, and describe the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956.
   3. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights ActsFollow the protests of Birmingham, the March on Washington and Selma to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, state what each act did, and read the rise in Black voter registration in Mississippi and Alabama.
4. 4

   Asian American history

   3 lessons

   1. Chinese migration and the Exclusion ActExplain why Chinese workers came to California and built the Central Pacific Railroad, how anti-Chinese politics produced the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, what exclusion did to Chinese immigration, and how the Angel Island station and the paper-son system worked.
   2. Japanese American incarcerationExplain how Executive Order 9066 of February 1942 led to the removal and confinement of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in ten camps, how the Supreme Court ruled in Hirabayashi and Korematsu, what the camps were like and how Nisei served, and how the 1988 redress law and later rulings judged the policy.
   3. The 1965 act and new Asian AmericaExplain how the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 ended the national-origins quotas and opened immigration from Asia through family and occupational preferences, trace the growth of Asian immigration by decade and origin, and distinguish the professional, family and refugee streams, including Vietnamese arrivals after 1975.
5. 5

   European immigrants and whiteness

   3 lessons

   1. Irish and German migration and nativismExplain why the Irish and Germans migrated in large numbers from the 1830s to the 1850s, read a chart of arrivals by origin, and explain the rise of nativism and the Know-Nothing party and the place of Catholic Irish immigrants in racial thinking.
   2. The new immigration and the Immigration CommissionDescribe the immigration of Italians, Jews, Poles and others from southern and eastern Europe from 1880 to 1924, how Ellis Island processed them, how the Immigration Commission and its Dictionary of Races classified them, and how this led to the quota acts of 1921 and 1924.
   3. Becoming white: unions, the GI Bill and suburbsExplain how the New Deal, the GI Bill and federal mortgage policy helped Italian, Jewish, Polish and other European ethnic families build wealth and join an expanded white middle class while the same programmes, through exclusion and redlining, shut most Black families out.
6. 6

   Mexican American history

   3 lessons

   1. The 1848 treaty and the new borderExplain how the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War led to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Mexican Cession, what the treaty promised to Mexicans in the ceded lands, and how those promises on citizenship and property were weakened in California, New Mexico and Texas.
   2. Mexican labor, repatriation and the Bracero programExplain how Mexican migration grew in the early twentieth century, how the Depression-era repatriation drives removed hundreds of thousands of people, many of them American citizens, and how the Bracero program of 1942 to 1964 supplied farm labour under contract, with the chart of contracts by year and its legacy.
   3. The Chicano movementExplain how Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, land-grant activists, the 1968 East Los Angeles school walkouts and the political and cultural organising of the late 1960s built a Chicano identity and a movement for civil rights, with dates from 1965 to 1975.
7. 7

   Native nations and the United States

   3 lessons

   1. Treaties and Indian removalExplain how the United States dispossessed the southeastern Native nations: treaty-making and Native sovereignty, Chief Justice Marshall's Cherokee cases of 1823 to 1832, Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its narrow House vote, the contested Treaty of New Echota, and the forced removals of the 1830s mapped as routes to Indian Territory.
   2. Allotment, boarding schools and assimilationExplain the assimilation era of federal Indian policy from 1879 to 1934: the Dawes Act of 1887 and how allotment and surplus land sales cut Native landholding from about 138 million acres to about 48 million, the boarding school system begun at Carlisle in 1879, the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, and the reversal in the Meriam Report and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
   3. Termination, activism and self-determinationExplain the swing in federal Indian policy from termination in the 1950s to self-determination in the 1970s: House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280 in 1953, the relocation program and Native urbanization, the Red Power movement from the Alcatraz occupation to Wounded Knee in 1973, and the laws of 1975 to 1988 that rebuilt tribal self-government.
8. 8

   Immigration law over time

   3 lessons

   1. Naturalization and citizenship from 1790Trace who could become a US citizen from 1790 to 1952: the 1790 Naturalization Act's free white persons rule, Dred Scott and the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship, the 1870 extension to people of African descent, United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, the racial prerequisite cases of Ozawa and Thind, and the removal of racial bars by 1952.
   2. The national origins quota era, 1921 to 1965Explain how the United States restricted immigration by race and nationality from 1917 to 1965: the Dillingham Commission and eugenic arguments, the 1917 literacy test and Asiatic Barred Zone, the quota acts of 1921 and 1924 and how their formulas favoured northern and western Europe, the Western Hemisphere exemption, and the collapse in arrivals shown in annual immigration data.
   3. Immigration since 1965Explain how US immigration changed after 1965: the Hart-Celler Act's preference system and its unintended effects, the shift in origins from Europe to Latin America and Asia shown in census shares of the foreign-born, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, and the growth and plateau of the unauthorized population.