Reconstruction 360 uses a 360 degree video platform as a storytelling device that lets the audience step inside pivotal Reconstruction events. By clicking on icons within the 360 video the user can access short documentaries that offer the perspectives of multiple characters, historians and descendants. Reconstruction 360 also includes lesson plans, curriculum standards and primary documents.
In this module, Teaching Ourselves, welcome to a small school in rural Alabama. Everyone in the community is excited about the new teacher, a recent Normal School graduate who brings spelling books for her students.
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A popular book for teaching spelling and reading was Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, known as “the blue-back speller” because of its binding. Many enslaved people, including Frederick...
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These little chalkboards would be used by the students in this class to practice reading, writing and arithmetic. They are a type of tablet, a solid, flat surface that can be written on...
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Although this school has only a few students, many schools for freedpeople were overcrowded. Like most newly emancipated people, these children believe that education is the key to maintaining freedom...
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Freedpeople often had difficulty finding appropriate school buildings, and Black students regularly attended school in churches. Ministers were often happy to host schools in their churches, and...
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This community member, the leader of a local mutual aid society , has been instrumental in raising funds to hire a new teacher. Black communities often pooled their money to build schools and pay...
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The flowers used in this vignette were purchased for the scene and aren’t necessarily native to Alabama. Native wildflowers are sometimes considered weeds, but they play an important role in natural...
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The Freedmen’s Bureau supported African American education. Although the bureau didn’t operate schools or hire teachers, its agents helped build schools and supply them with books, and they sometimes...
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A fugitive slave and an abolitionist, Frederick Douglass sailed to Britain in 1845 and stayed for 19 months. He was a powerful orator, and his antislavery speeches attracted huge crowds...
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The American Missionary Society and other private benevolent societies from the North helped to establish more than five hundred schools and colleges for formerly enslaved people in the South...
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On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making him a symbol of Black freedom for years to come. As the war dragged on he began to recruit Blacks, free and enslaved, to the...