The Reconstruction Era and The Fragility of Democracy

By Facing History and Ourselves

The Reconstruction Era and The Fragility of Democracy uses our pedagogical approach to help students examine how a society rebuilds after extraordinary division and trauma, when the ideals of democracy are most vulnerable.

 
 The unit presents educators with materials they need to engage students in a deep study of the pivotal era of American history that followed the Civil War. It provides history teachers with dozens of primary and secondary source documents, close reading exercises, lesson plans, and activity suggestions that will push students both to build a complex understanding of the dilemmas and conflicts Americans faced during Reconstruction and to identify the legacies of this history that extended through the 20th century to the present day. 


These materials will help students examine closely themes such as historical memory, justice, and civic participation in a democracy. The unit includes a variety of interdisciplinary teaching strategies that reinforce historical and literacy skills. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facing History and Ourselves
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940457208

Facing History and Ourselves

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make connections between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

Book preview

978-1-940457-20-8

Acknowledgments

Primary writer: Daniel Sigward

This publication was made possible by the support of the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation.

Developing this guide was a collaborative effort that required the input and expertise of a variety of people. Many Facing History and Ourselves staff members made invaluable contributions. The guidance of Adam Strom was essential from start to finish. Jeremy Nesoff played a critical role through his partnership with Dan Sigward and, along with Denny Conklin and Jocelyn Stanton, helped to shape the curriculum by providing feedback on numerous drafts. Margot Stern Strom, Marc Skvirsky, and Marty Sleeper served as a thoughtful editorial team. Anika Bachhuber, Brooke Harvey, and Samantha Landry kept the writing and production process moving forward. Catherine O’Keefe and Ariel Perry attended to countless details and transformed the manuscript into this beautiful and polished publication. Erin Kernen carefully managed to secure all license contracts. Rob Tokanel, Alexia Prichard, Wilkie Cook, and Liz Kelleher creatively adapted and extended this resource as they developed the companion videos and website.

We also benefited greatly from the experience and advice of the ninth-grade history teachers in the Boston Public Schools—under the leadership of Robert Chisholm and James Liou—who piloted two versions of this curriculum in successive years. Additional feedback from Facing History staff members and teachers who conducted pilots in Cleveland, Memphis, Denver, and San Francisco helped us fine-tune the curriculum before final publication.

Finally, we are grateful to have received guidance and feedback from distinguished historians and experts in history education. We owe special thanks to Eric Foner, Chad Williams, Steven Cohen, Chandra Manning, and Heather Cox Richardson.

INTRODUCTION

The Fragility of Democracy

by Marty Sleeper, Associate Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves

In Facing History and Ourselves classrooms, students learn that democracy, among the most fragile of human enterprises, is always a work in progress and can only remain vital through the active, thoughtful, and responsible participation of its citizens. Its ideals of freedom, equality, and justice require constant vigilance and sustenance. Those moments in history when these ideals were assaulted and democracy was put at risk, if not destroyed, need close and rigorous examination in the school curriculum. This unit provides teachers and students with opportunities to look closely at one such moment in American history: the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

The core Facing History resource, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, explores the failure of democracy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, when such institutions as law, education, and civil legislation collapsed in the face of deep-seated prejudice, hatred, and violence. While Facing History rejects simple comparisons in history, the parallels between the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Reconstruction era in America are striking in their illumination of the fragility of democracy as both a means of governance and a set of societal ideals. The question of how a society heals and rebuilds after extraordinary division and trauma, when the ideals and values of democracy may be most vulnerable, can be explored in histories addressed by other Facing History resources as well, such as the history of South Africa after apartheid, the struggles in Cambodia, Bosnia, or Rwanda after genocides, and the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after World War II. But this unit on Reconstruction in America reveals how memory and history are themselves vulnerable and can be used by leaders in later generations to unleash racial hatred, justify discrimination, and deny liberty and equality to racial or religious minorities.

New scholarship and perspectives on the past must constantly be brought to bear on how we understand the present. Examining the era of Reconstruction is a prime example. Few would deny that this history has been poorly and insufficiently taught. Its dilemmas deserve the close and rigorous attention that this unit offers. Moreover, themes of identity, membership, individual and group choice, responsibility, and denial—all components of human behavior that Facing History uses as a conceptual framework and vocabulary to help students enter into the past—permeate the era of Reconstruction, and their elaboration in this unit will assist students in understanding Reconstruction’s legacy today. Exploring this history in all its complexity offers young people a critical opportunity to exercise their capacity for emotional growth and ethical judgment as they connect its lessons to the issues and the choices faced in their own world and the world of the future.

Teaching This Unit

This curriculum is designed to guide you and your students through a Facing History and Ourselves unit about the Reconstruction era of American history. In this unit, students will investigate the challenges of creating a just democracy in a time of deep division. The resources included here have been selected and sequenced in order to deepen students’ ethical and moral reasoning, challenge their critical thinking and literacy skills, and engage them in a rigorous study of history.

This unit unfolds over 16 lessons sequenced according to the scope and sequence that shapes every Facing History and Ourselves course of study. Students begin with an examination of the relationship between the individual and society, reflect on the way that humans divide themselves into in groups and out groups throughout history, dive deep into a case study on the history of Reconstruction, and then explore the way that history is remembered and the impact of its various legacies in contemporary society. Each lesson includes essential questions, pedagogical rationales, historical overviews, resources to use in your classroom (documents, images, videos, websites, etc.), and activity suggestions.

Fostering a Reflective Classroom

While this curriculum offers a wealth of resources to support a deep exploration of the Reconstruction era, it is missing a crucial ingredient in any Facing History unit: the unique voices of your students and you, the teacher. We cannot predict how the particular students in your classroom will respond to the ideas, history, resources, and activities that comprise this course. We trust and respect your ability to make wise choices based on careful attention to your students’ questions and ideas. The roles of the teacher in a successful Facing History classroom are both numerous and essential. It will be your job not only to listen but also, at times, to be directive. It will be your job to carefully guide class discussions, providing accurate answers to clarify points of confusion and enforcing rules and guidelines to safeguard a reflective, respectful learning environment.

We believe that two ways in which you can create a strong foundation for a reflective classroom are through the use of student journals and classroom contracts. Journals help students develop their voices and clarify their ideas as they keep a record of their thinking and learning throughout the unit. Engaging students in the process of creating a classroom contract demonstrates to them that both the teacher and their classmates will respect their voices. Even if you already incorporate both of these elements into your instruction, we encourage you to review the appendix sections Fostering a Reflective Classroom and Journals in a Facing History Classroom for detailed suggestions for guiding and honoring the voices of your students.

Using These Materials

The following overview outlines the organization of these materials.

Sections

The lessons in this unit are grouped into six sections. These sections follow the Facing History and Ourselves scope and sequence, and they provide logical thematic divisions for the historical content.

Lessons

Every section in this unit contains one or more lessons. Lessons are divided into the following components:

Essential Questions

Each lesson begins with one or more essential questions. These questions are designed to provide a framework for the lesson by probing the big ideas and important themes that arise from the historical content of the lesson. Our essential questions do not specifically or explicitly probe the historical content of the lesson, and we do not expect that students will fully answer them by the end of the lesson or the unit as a whole.

According to Grant Wiggins, an essential question

causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;

provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;

requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers;

stimulates vital, ongoing rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;

sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences; and

naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.¹

Transition

This short paragraph will help orient you as to how this lesson fits into the unit’s sequence of themes and topics. The language included here can help you introduce the lesson to the class, explaining how it relates to lessons that the class has already completed as well as those that will follow.

Rationale

The rationale for each lesson is designed to answer the following questions:

What do we hope students will learn in this lesson?

Why is this material important?

What additional background knowledge do you, the teacher, need to understand in order to teach this lesson effectively and answer questions that might arise from the class?

We encourage you to read the rationale for each section carefully in order to glean important information and guidance about how to frame central ideas and present challenging and complicated historical events for your students in ways that best support intellectual and emotional growth. The rationale will provide historical information that will help you better understand and articulate the goals of each lesson to the class.

Our hope is that actively reading our rationale helps you articulate your own goals for teaching this material. As you read each rationale, consider the following questions:

What parts of the history will resonate most with your students?

What details and nuances in the history can you share with the class to help them better understand the lesson’s documents and think more deeply about the moral and ethical dilemmas they encounter?

Learning Goals

The learning goals for each lesson are divided into understanding goals and knowledge goals.

Understanding goals include broad ideas, concepts, and patterns relating to the themes of human behavior, freedom, justice, and democracy that extend beyond the particulars of the lesson’s historical content. These goals are often related to the essential questions for the lesson.

Knowledge goals include key ideas and concepts we expect students to learn that are particular to the topic and content of the lesson, and especially to the history of Reconstruction.

Resource List

The resource list includes documents, images, videos, student handouts, and any other materials you will need to teach the lesson. Many of these materials are included in this curriculum and are suitable to photocopy for students or project in your classroom. Others, such as videos, can be borrowed from the Facing History library or streamed online. Teachers may need to make choices about which resources to include in their lessons and which to omit.

Lesson Plans and Activity Suggestions

The Reconstruction Era and The Fragility of Democracy includes six full lesson plans: one to help you introduce a central question and writing prompt for the entire unit and five to support specific themes and content in the history of Reconstruction. These lesson plans model how we believe these materials can be effectively implemented. We expect that teachers will use and adapt these lesson plans to best suit the needs of their particular classes.

For lessons that do not include a full lesson plan, we have included brief suggestions for teaching strategies that you might use to achieve the goals of the lesson. The Teaching Strategies section of our website provides more detailed descriptions of many of the teaching strategies suggested here.

Literacy Skills, Historical Thinking,

and the Common Core

This resource provides opportunities for students to practice literacy and historical thinking skills that are appropriate and meaningful in any history classroom. The materials in this unit are also grounded in the three instructional shifts required by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts:

Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction

This curriculum presents the history of the Reconstruction era through a variety of primary and secondary sources. Students build knowledge through their deep investigation of text and content through discussion, writing, and individual and group activities.

Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from text

Many activities throughout this curriculum require that students explain and defend their responses and analysis using evidence from one or more texts. (One example of this is the culminating writing assignment based on the central question, described in the next section.) In addition, the resource provides a wide variety of opportunities for different forms of writing and discussion.

Regular practice with complex text and academic language

Many of the texts included in this resource are indeed complex and highly sophisticated. In their analysis of these texts, students will practice the close reading of texts and the use of academic vocabulary.

While all of the lessons in this resource were designed, in part, with these skills in mind, two parts of this curriculum in particular target literacy skills valued by the Common Core. The first is a series of structured close reading activities, and the second is a set of central questions that provide the basis for an argumentative or informational writing assignment that spans the duration of the unit.

Close Reading Activities

Five lessons in this unit include materials to help you engage your students in a close reading of one of the lesson’s documents. Close reading includes careful rereading and analysis of a text with special attention to what the author’s purpose is, what the words mean, and what the structure of the text tells us.

Each activity includes a carefully sequenced series of text-dependent questions that will also help you address the Common Core State Standards for literacy in history and social studies. These questions will provide students with practice in drawing conclusions from the text and supporting them with specific textual evidence. The close reading questions were created by Dr. David Pook, chair of the history department at the Derryfield School and an educational consultant. Pook was a contributing writer to the Common Core State Standards.

Each close reading activity also includes suggestions for making connections between what students learn from their careful investigation of the text and broader themes in their study of Reconstruction, as well as essential questions about history, human behavior, and ourselves.

Common Core–Aligned Unit Assessment

We have also provided central questions, or writing prompts, below to guide your entire investigation of Reconstruction and also to use as the basis for a unit assessment. They are meant to be introduced at the beginning of the unit and referred to throughout different lessons. As students learn more about Reconstruction and interrogate historical texts, they will gather evidence to help them reflect deeply about these questions. At times it will be useful to stop and hold class discussions, giving students an opportunity to change their opinions, analyze evidence in relation to the prompt, and develop claims for an essay. We have included one question that can serve as an argumentative writing prompt and one that can serve as an informative prompt to honor both types of writing suggested by the Common Core State Standards for the history/social studies classroom.

The section Introducing the Writing Prompt after Lesson 1 provides a detailed lesson plan modeling how to introduce the argumentative prompt. You can adapt the plan as needed if you choose to use the informative prompt instead of the argumentative one. We recommend that students use an evidence log to gather and analyze evidence at regular intervals. A sample evidence log is provided after Lesson 3. We also recommend that students begin to develop a claim (or thesis) and organize their evidence around that claim by the end of Lesson 13. They can draft, revise, and publish their essays after the unit’s lessons are complete. The Teaching Strategies section of our website provides strategies you can use to supplement this unit and support students at every stage of the writing process.