Hi, I love history and have since I found out I was born on Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Sadly I also live in an area where many people still claim the Civil War was mainly about State rights. While I know that was apart of it from my readings and from documents I have seen I also know a large part of it dealt with slavery either directly or indirectly byway of economy. I was wondering if y'all could suggest some sources or good ways of explaining that time period and getting high school age students to understand the time period and the world at that time. Thank you!!!
As someone who's taught in the past, I think the best way to engage students regardless of background would be to stick as much as possible to primary documentation.
For a decent start, Yale Law's Avalon Project has a Confederate States of America collection that includes several Southern states' declarations of secession, as well as messages to Congress and communications between Davis and Lincoln. The declarations specifically are brief and not too hard for high schoolers to get a handle on, and do a fine job of summing up exactly why some states decided to leave the union in their own words.
The American Battlefields Trust has a larger "Primary Sources" collection that includes those declarations as well as slightly more martial documents like Patrick Cleburne's Proposal to Arm Slaves, Ambrose Bierce's grisly "Chickamauga", Stonewall Jackson's report on Second Manassas and a letter from Samuel Cabble, a former slave and a soldier in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry (colored), to his wife, still enslaved. ("great is the outpouring of the colered peopl that is now rallying with the hearts of lions against that very curse that has seperated you an me yet we shall meet again and oh what a happy time that will be when this ungodly rebellion shall be put down....")
They've even got Lincoln's polite refusal of the King of Siam's offer of battle elephants.
Most of the material is fairly clear, and it should be harder for accusations of bias or misinterpretation to stick if you're using a lot of primary sources and letting students discover what these figures say for themselves.