Brief video on Nantucket's whaling, with special emphasis on AA role.

This is an AWESOME clip demonstrating how cotton was cleaned by hand. This would be an awesome preview to why the cotton gin was such a huge improvement on the cotton industry.

Interesting video showing a quick reenactment of Whitney's Cotton Gin

Questions to go along with some of the primary sources on this sight

excerpt from Lucy Larcom's book A New England Girlhood. Gets at some of the harsh rules/expectations of girls.

Magazine report on the conditions of workers in Lowell mills. note the early date, 1836

excerpt from her autobiography, describing life as a mill girl

Literacy Tests history

Request by African Americans in a small Georgian town for federal troops to help protect them from violent white neighbors

Primary Source from African American female recounting her experiences related to education in the South for former slaves.

Primary Source -- African American experience during Reconstruction in the South

poem about John Brown, alluding to war, 2 years before Civil War, and just after Brown's hanging.

But in two small-scale but heavily laden exhibitions - one at the New-York Historical Society, drawing on the extraordinary Gilder Lehrman Collection, the other at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond (the first show devoted to Brown in a city that was the capital of the Confederacy) - it becomes clear that Brown's legacy is nearly as riven now as it was on the eve of the Civil War. His actions still raise unresolved issues about the limits of dissent, the nature of terrorism and the effects of revolutionary violence.