Perspectives on the United States
African Americans
Women’s Suffrage
Pullman Porters
The Narrative of Sarah Graves
Race, Respectability, and Resilience: African Americans in the Midwest
The 1919 Race Riots
Flappers, G-men, and Prohibition’s Legacies
What caused Prohibition and passage of the Eighteenth Amendment?
Other Americans and the American Revolution
Who identified as “American” during the Revolution? To what extent did the American Revolution serve the interests of all inhabitants of the emerging nation?
The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Urban North
What does de facto segregation in the urban North look like? How is it similar and different from de jure segregation in the South? How did African Americans respond to the segregation and racism they faced in the North? How did the civil rights movement in the urban North connect to the movement in the South?
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Race in Postbellum America
How did Twain’s Huckleberry Finn engage and challenge popular ideas about slavery and race in nineteenth-century America? Can a text be offensive and still be worth reading?
Chicago and the Great Migration, 1915–1950
Why did so many African Americans leave the South and move to Chicago between 1915 and 1950? What social conditions did they encounter in Chicago? How were the migrants changed by the city and how did they, in turn, change it?
Lincoln, the North, and the Question of Emancipation
What are Lincoln's arguments against slavery? What distinctions do Lincoln and other white Northerners draw between ending the institution of slavery, saving the Union, and achieving racial equality? What feelings and concerns do writers and artists—both white and African American—express about the consequences of emancipation?