Teaching the History of the Reconstruction Amendments: Syllabus and Teachers Manual for 'The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents'

Abstract

The publication of “THE RECONSTRUCTION AMENDMENTS: ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS” (2 volumes) presents teachers and scholars a unique and unprecedented opportunity to construct a course around the original historical documents relating to the framing and ratification of the three “Reconstruction Amendments,” the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the American Constitution. The two volumes contain hundreds of original documents illustrating the grand public debate which took place from 1865 to 1870 and resulted in the abolition of slavery, the protection of the rights of national citizenship and the guarantee of the right to vote free from racial discrimination. The voices participating in this extraordinary constitutional event include U.S. presidents, military generals, radical abolitionists, pragmatist Republicans, obstructionist Democrats, black civil rights activists like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the participants in freedmen conventions and equal rights conventions, petition writers, newspaper essayists, and women’s rights activists like Francis Watkins Harper, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This syllabus and teachers manual present a fourteen-week model course studying the antebellum arguments that formed the historical background to constitutional reconstruction (slavery, federalism and the nature of the original constitution) and the congressional and public debates which accompanied the framing and ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In addition to a model syllabus, the teachers manual includes specific weekly reading assignments and suggested questions for class discussion. The manual also includes instructor notes providing the historical context surrounding each week’s assigned materials and their importance to the overall course.