OP, this is a great question. I wish more prospective history teachers, whoever they expect their students to be, would ask it. As I'm sure you know, one of your struggles will probably be fitting black history into a set of standards and materials that almost couldn't possibly be more about white dudes. My chief area of study as been the intersection of the white political world and slavery, so I can't help you out too much with things after 1865, but the decades before are often the whitest and dude-iest of the set and that's my usual stomping grounds.

Traditionally, slavery is something that just happens into being around 1830 when the Liberator hits. There's long been a powerful bias against taking slavery seriously as a political issue before then, doubly so for taking it as a vitally important one. Even the Missouri Compromise has been approached more as an esoteric dispute between congressmen than a huge national issue.

Let's turn that around. The central problem of slavery, from which its distinctiveness flows, is that the slaves don't want to be slaves and will do whatever they can to make their lives more bearable. Slavery is a labor system, but it's also a political system built to control and defeat that impulse. Enslaved people breaking tools, abusing livestock, running away (even if only to get away for a few days), working slowly or poorly, and so forth are all engaged in acts with inherent political salience even if they don't for the most part have a real expectation that they will lead to revolution.

The enslavers know it. In the United States, they're also in constant, intimate contact with the enslaved. They are frequently outnumbered in their own homes, in whole counties, regions, and in a few entire states. Surrounded by a population who they understand, for all their protests to the contrary, as alien and opposed, leaves them profoundly insecure and drives the development of a distinctive political culture increasingly at odds with what goes on in the rest of the nation. Slavery places the enslaved in an almost infinitely vulnerable, insecure position as individuals. The slave system must reckon with their tremendous potential power as a people.

That's no trifling task and the enslavers worked themselves into a fury to keep on keeping on. It was their constant project, from probably the 1660s onward. We usually periodize slavery by trends in white opinion. From that POV, the 1830ish turning point is ok. We underrate the degree of white antislavery sentiment in the decades right after independence...except in the South where we radically overrate it. (We always neglect the degree of black antislavery sentiment because we imagine the political world as white.) There is a change around then, but it largely represents white radical thought moving closer to black thought: the system is not and maybe cannot just work this all out; something needs to be done.

Pushing the antebellum salience of slavery as an issue backwards is a necessary corrective, and a good way to center things more on black Americans as a center of gravity in American life, but it's got its own complications. The reason 1830 is a good hinge is that there is the aforementioned shift. Just projecting the late antebellum back into the 1820s or 1790s isn't good history because the issue isn't approached in quite the same ways on both sides and the political realities they operate in are different. Traditional Antebellum antislavery, until the 1850s, is usually outside the political mainstream. Sometimes, as with the abolitionists, it can be outright apolitical. Up until 1820 or so there's still reason to believe, at least for many northern whites, that the American system really could fix slavery. It would not do so over night or even easily, but the general progress of time and the gears of Union would restrict, restrain, and reduce slavery by gradual stages. The US banned slavery northwest of the Ohio in the Northwest Ordinance, then those territories began coming in as a free (or sometimes "free") states. Congress voted overwhelmingly to end slave imports at its first constitutional opportunity. The northern states enacted gradual emancipation. The future looks good for freedom.

The next logical step is to ban slavery in a territory (which Congress has the clear power to do) and so further the gradual encirclement of the slave states. Enter the Missouri Controversy, wherein the South rehearses most of its 1850s rhetoric and wins. Missouri's slavery is intact and the antislavery side comes out with a worthless concession prize in the form of a pinky swear. That's largely how antislavery whites come to realize the existing order may not be their friend after all. So the 1830s pivot.

By contrast, the white South is much more consistent. At least from 1800 onward, most of the South, most of the time, is for slavery forever. They'll make vague gestures about how they're uncomfortable and would like it gone, but concrete action is lacking from almost the get-go. The sectional consensus is that slavery is essential and must be preserved against all hazards, internal and external. Slavery is so important, and vulnerable because of the great potential of black Americans as a group, that white dissent (what little there is) cannot be allowed to flourish either at home or abroad in the North. The narrative arc here is still one about white Americans, which obviously isn't ideal, but it at least takes black Americans more seriously. It's also one where antislavery whites spend sixty years playing catch up to proslavery whites and antislavery blacks, both of whom have a better grasp of what's really at stake. If it's not the dominant issue for white reformers (who historians tend to like) then it certainly is for white reactionaries and black Americans.

My teacher training is long in the past now and I was never very good at designing lessons. I'm also a white dude who grew up in an amazingly white community so my practical experience with your situation is nil. But I think that re-centering the narrative this way at least makes it less detached from the lives of black Americans. To expand on that, I would look into including a fair number of black voices in readings and presentations. Frederick Douglass' first narrative is a hundred pages, a good size for a possible outside reading project. For black political organization against slavery, look into Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker outright urges revolution. He had his work smuggled into the South to be read to actual slaves and he died under suspicious circumstances. I feel like that might really appeal to teenagers, especially combined with the snapshot of slavery in Douglass' work. Jordan Anderson's To My Old Master is usually a crowd-pleaser, especially if you have good dramatic reading chops. I would like to recommend some black women too, but the narratives I'm most familiar with there both involve some frank talk about sexual violence that might be really difficult to handle well. I would avoid the WPA narratives because they have serious historiographical issues and have to be handled carefully.

For secondary materials, it's a bit hard to recommend much because the ideas I'm working with are the new thing in US political historiography. Finkelman's Slavery and the Founders and Kaminsky's A Necessary Evil? push slavery politics back to the Constitution and a touch before. Waldstreicher's Slavery's Constitution continues the theme. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic is really good on how the proslavery concessions in the Constitution and the practical work of the federal government are going concerns all the way to 1860, but he's much weaker on the founding generation. Mason's Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic traces the theme to about Missouri, as does his co-edited volume Contesting Slavery. For Missouri the go-to book has to be Forbes' The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath. From about then on, you can probably rely on the usual antebellum surveys for the most part. Varon's Disunion! is new a pretty good. If you want just southern politics, then Freehling's Road to Disunion volumes can't be beat except that he takes southern qualms about slavery quite a bit more seriously than I do. Cooper's Liberty & Slavery is older and shorter but, I think, better argued on the proslavery white hegemony in the South. Also good on the intellectual consolidation is Clement Eaton's The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, but it's very crusty (original early Forties, second edition early Sixties).

If you have the resources and can fit it in, it might be worth digging out Stampp's classic The Peculiar Institution. The thing is ancient, but it's a great book to recommend to people who want to know a little bit about everything when it comes to American slavery and still get the big picture, at least current as to the late antebellum. It's also pretty readable for a history book. Kolchin's American Slavery and Davis' Inhuman Bondage are much more up to date and better from a strictly scholarly POV, being so much newer and broader, but they're so sweeping they might be hard to make good use of for kids: "Wait...we're going back to the 1400s again?!"

Great question! Since others seem to have the methodology covered, I'll add a bunch of books that touch on subjects I think you can explore (listed chronologically by subject) to cover the first half of US history. Basing a unit off each of these books would give both a solid timeline of US history and engage your students with major historical scholarship, something that is otherwise totally lacking in K-12 education.

Edmund S. Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery - This classic work argues that, by the dawn of the 18th century, Virginia planters had used racism as a tool to unify rich and poor whites. Slave-owning became part of the American dream as the Virginia model was exported to other colonies.

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks examines the processes by which Africans became African-Americans, and how African inheritances shaped black life and black resistance in America

Judith Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light is a brand-new telling of the role of black soldiers in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Upwards of 20% of the army might have been black by the end of the war.

David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution argues that the interest of slaveholders was the deciding factor in many of the compromises and decisions that framed the federal government.

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy shows how the Revolution and the early Republic viewed and rationalized slavery, and how enslaved people used the Revolution and the War of 1812 (main focus) to pursue their own freedom.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul exposes the brutal world of the Antebellum slave market. Johnson argues that the meaning and horror of being viewed and treated as property was never more apparent than on the auction block, and he thus explores the slave trade as the cornerstone of the Southern economy.

The Civil War, fittingly, gets two books. Colin Edward Woodward, Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War looks at the centrality of white supremacy and the defense of slavery in the minds of many Confederate soldiers, shattering the lame argument that so many poor Southerners would never fight for a system they weren't part of.

Ira Berlin, Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War takes readers inside the regiments of the United States Colored Troops, and demonstrates that they played a far more significant role in the Union's victory than popular memory credits them with.

Steve Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet looks at Reconstruction from a black perspective, focusing on the discussions within the freedpeople community as to what they wanted out of the new South and how they might go about getting it.

Interesting post and your questions seem incredibly valid. When I finished my MA I landed a history teacher position at a charter school in New York City. I also faced similar questions in the job interview process and was left feeling stumped myself. As a white male from suburban North America, African American history in my education was basically a February discussion, and like you, I later came to see this as incredibly disheartening. As an early Americanist, I can speak little to the late nineteenth century or twentieth century. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts:

1. Even if you're teaching at the high school level, chances are your class will not only focuses on African American history. The real challenge is incorporating African Americans, their stories, customs, traditions, exploitation, throughout the course. Often, history textbooks only talk about African Americans when they discuss slavery in the South, Emancipation and Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. Your job is to demonstrate that African Americans were integral to the development of the United States from the very beginning. Here are some sources that can help:

• slave trade database A tremendous undertaking that mapped the slave trade to the Americas. Note that the vast majority of slaves were not taken to what would become the United States. I would also suggest a book like Robin Law's Ouidah for your own reading that demonstrates that the transatlantic slave trade was equally transformative to Africa as it was to the Americas.

• Black Perspectives A wonderful blog mostly on modern America and the African American experience full of posts from scholars about the role of African Americans in many aspects of American History. Also keep your eye on Omohundro Institute's Octo Page, which posts interesting blogs relating to early American history.

• Try and keep abreast of accessible African America literature. There are TONS of free sources available from all different periods. African American "Loyalist" Boston King; Abolitionist leader and African Born Olaudah Equiano you can find a summary of his Narrative Here; and there are MANY more.

• The Smithsonian just opened their African American History Museum and I'm sure there is tons of information there.

• The Library of Congress Digital Collections must have tons on African American history is you're willing to look through.

• I can recommend books for days; however, I think at the high school level you could maybe only assign one or two and I'd have to go with DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk or another classic like that.

2. My second suggestion is to teach American History in a global perspective. The best academic historians aren't writing American history as if it occurred in a vacuum anymore and the result is tremendous scholarship on how "global" the United States has always been. This is incredibly important for African American history because these people represent one of the largest diasporic populations in history. It's important to link African American history in the United States with African history, Latin American History, Caribbean History, etc.

3. Finally, African American history in the United States is inherently a story of struggle and resistance. This does not mean, however, that you cannot highlight the success. African Americans NEVER accepted slavery, Jim Crow, Segregation, or continued racism. This is more than a story of rebellion and protest as well. Countless scholars have demonstrated that African Americans carved out their own niches in society under slavery and during segregation. That story continues today. The story you present doesn't always have to be a story of gloom and despair; there is also a tremendous amount of triumph.

All the best in your job search and early career. Keep up the good fight. Cheers!

Orange flair day in here ay! I'm white too, and I'm a Kiwi, so I'm far removed from your education system. On the other hand, I think this might help me because I only learned American history at University, when it was taught to me by Americans who had a specific focus on marginalised groups.

My personal interest in black history is the Civil Rights movement, and I'd be using that as my starting point for black history. Someone else(/u/IrishPatobie I think?) replied saying that the best way to do it is to incorporate African Americans into the general history of the US, and I wholeheartedly agree. With that in mind, I'd suggest Charles Payne's book Time Longer than Rope, which looks at the idea of a long civil rights movement that extends beyond the traditional 1954-1974. In reality, the civil rights movement is ongoing today with BLM, and began back during slavery.

I'm not sure how your curriculum works, but American history is so large that I'd still suggest you try and pick different areas to look at. When you get to a Civil Rights module, you could use the long movement narrative and then point to other modules to trace the progress(or lack thereof). You could also teach it alongside other modules I suppose.

My one request would be that you look at the importance of African American churchwomen in the black community. They were the foundation for the grassroots networks that made the 20th century Civil Rights movement happen, and all too often they're pushed aside in favour of MLK and the other church leaders.