Annotated Bibliography

Joel Hebert

TAH Making Freedom

Annotated Bibliography

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Buffalo: Auburn, Derby and Miller, 1854.

This slave narrative is a primary source of how precarious freedom was for free blacks in the 19^th century. Students relate to it because Northup was a free man kidnapped into slavery: several students connected this to the film Taken where a white American girl is abducted and sold into sex slavery in Europe.

Primary Source, Inc. Lift Ever’y Voice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.

This book provided me with several primary documents I ended up using in lesson plans. It also had great ideas for lesson plans detailing how to use these documents. This is where I got the inspiration to use parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Twelve Years as a Slave.

Roots. Directed by Marvin Chomsky. Starring Olivia Cole and Levar Burton. Produced by David Wolper. 1977.

This mini-series, based on Alex Haley’s bestselling novel, features many poignant scenes. With the help of youtube, I played the famous scene where Kunta Kinte is whipped until he accepts the new slave name Toby. This has strong parallels with Solomon Northup’s slave narrative.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: John Jewett and Co., 1852.

This bestseller is such an important work of American literature I feel compelled to review it with my students (most of whom never read any of it). The two excerpts we examined both deal with the separation of slaves from family members during slave auctions. It creates a sense of empathy in the reader now, just as it did 150+ years ago when it helped the abolitionist cause and led the country closer to war.

http://voicethread.com/?#u1021955.b1268781.i6875487 and http://voicethread.com/?#u1021955.b1281342.i6875450. Accessed on September 16, 2010.

The images on these Voicethreads came from the New York Library of Congress. My Voicethreads were comprised of over a dozen primary sources, including drawings, painting, and photographs dealing with slavery and the abolition movement. These primary sources provided a review of major aspects of slavery and the abolitionist movie. Newspaper accounts of slave auctions, manumission documents, and artist renderings of slave life are just some of the documents in the Voicethreads I made.