How much do you know about American Slavery?

Research conducted by SPLC in 2017 shows that we, as a nation, are failing to adequately teach the hard history of American slavery. Wondering how your knowledge stacks up? Take this six-question quiz...

https://www.splcenter.org/data-projects/how-much-do-you-know-about-american-slavery

Creating the United States Exhibition LOC

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/

Locke and Inalienable rights

Why It Matters That Some Rights Are "Inalienable"
https://fee.org/articles/why-it-matters-that-some-rights-are-inalienable/

John Locke: Natural Rights to Life, Liberty, and Property
https://fee.org/articles/john-locke-natural-rights-to-life-liberty-and-property/

Founding Principles

 
Bowdoin College is pleased to offer "Founding Principles" as an instructive tool readily available and appropriate for a wide assortment of audiences.

Narrated by Bowdoin College Government Professor Andrew Rudalevige, the series provides an introductory overview and basic understanding to American government, but one that is crucial to building citizen-leaders, promoting civic engagement, and working toward the common good.

http://www.bowdoin.edu/founding-principles/

Animation of Atlantic Slave Trade

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html

NEH Summer Institute @ OU

cas.ou.edu/application1

"Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations" by Amy Dru Stanley

"Unlike chattel slavery..., the commodification of free labor long had posed a problem in Anglo-American traditions of thought. At least a century before Thomas Jefferson famously derided manufactures in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, wage labor had been associated with the hierarchies of the household and carried the stigma of dependence." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)

n the era of the American Founders, "Hirelings- no matter how voluntarily they put up their labor for sale or what the price they were paid- were considered not fully free. To be sure, the cash nexus, contract, and the play of the free market in labor eroded the personal relations of dominion and submission characteristic of the customary bonds of paternalism between the gentry and laboring people." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plain folk, patricians, political theorists, and members of Parliament joined in expressing "hostility to the status of wage-labourer," according to Christopher Hill's classic study of the subject. For the hireling had lost his birthright, "that property in a man's own labour and person," which was the badge of a free man." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)

Cicero and Adams: Architects of the Founding

The republican ideals of Cicero heavily influenced the generation of the Founding Fathers in favor of a mixed constitution. The works of John Adams, the unsung hero of the era, brought Ciceronian republican prescriptions to the forefront of American political thought at the time of the Founding. The influence of Cicero through Adams ultimately shaped the structure of the American Constitution and brought about the birth of the American Republic.



SURS: Garrett Lysford from Hellenic Studies on Vimeo.