Rationale:
There are three major goals of this unit. First, helping students to find the words to describe what they see in historical sources. Second, enabling all students to see BIPOC people as active participants in history. And third, learning how to critically analyze visual sources from the past.
I teach a class that is a combination of US History and Ethnic Studies. We examine US history from the “lens” of different groups throughout the year. In the first semester we examine the mythology around the founding of the United States and the perspectives of American Indians and African Americans. One of the Ethnic Studies goals in this class is to give students the vocabulary to talk about historically marginalized groups in a conscientious and sensitive manner. Another goal is to be sure students do not think of people in these groups as passive victims.
Students who are learning English as a second language often struggle with finding the correct terms to describe a person or situation with the appropriate level of sensitivity. By describing and analyzing images from the past that include people of color in ways that are contrary to common stereotypes this unit does the double work of disrupting racist narratives about the past, while developing the vocabulary for students to speak positively about non-white populations.
This unit is a presentation of historical images. American Indians and African descended people do not “speak” loudly in most textbook histories of the Colonial and Antebellum periods. Thus, I seek to amplify the voices of these marginalized groups and center them as much as possible. One problem with this goal is that there are relatively few written documents with firsthand insight into their perspectives. Visual images are a way around this limitation while also serving to humanize people who are often “invisible” in the mythology of American history.
The goal of the unit is to teach students the skills they need to critically analyze visual information from the past. We need to be as critical of visual sources as we are of written sources. Especially since the advent of photography in the nineteenth century, images have often been taken at “face value,” with an assumption that whatever is depicted is exactly true. Images (paintings, engravings, drawings, etc) made in the time period they represent tempt us into using them as unexamined primary source material. This uncritical use of sources fails to account for the conventions of representation at the time, the ideological position of the artist and, crucially, the extent to which the person(s) depicted controlled their own image/manner in which they were depicted. There was often a complex mixture of forces involved. Even influential people may not have controlled the clothing they wore, the pose, the setting, and the format of their image. Additionally the language of fashion, and its contemporary associations are difficult to interpret without the historical context.
Geographically this unit spans Canada to the Caribbean and all of them were created east of the Rocky Mountains. This is partly because of the sources that are available. It is difficult to cover the broadest perspectives, and places while maintaining focus on the places that would become the United States. Information from Spanish and French colonies is included as context in the colonial period, and the chronological scope is limited by the start of the U.S. Civil War.
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