American ExpansionAmerican Expansionin Four Intersectionsin Four Intersections

Dr. Yohuru WilliamsDr. Yohuru WilliamsAmerican Institute for History American Institute for History

EducationEducationFairfield UniversityFairfield University

Miami Essential Question

• “What were the major causes and effects of various expansionary times in U.S. history; i.e., territorially, economically, and/or politically?”   

Got a historical crime scene . . . Call us but don’t forget your tool kit.

• E.S.P• C.S.I.• Haunted

History• Red Light/Green

Light: the intersection

• Historical Fingerprinting

Historical Fingerprints

• Historical Finger printing simply means identifying the historical roots of modern America or historical antecedents of more recent history. For most of us those fingerprints can be found in our state standards.

Historical Fingerprinting

• What we will be looking for is the Core. The base of the argument or appeal. The Crossover, how that argument or appeal builds on earlier or relates to later historical events. Island in what ways is it the document unique or an “island” unto itself. And Bifurcation which refers to the main body of one item splitting into two parts. It could mean an argument or idea that has meaning for two different groups or time periods or a person or event that has applicability in two or more areas or eras. Sojourner Truth’s Aren't I A Woman Speech, for example has meaning for both African-American History and Women’s History.

Primary Source Analysis

An example of historical finger printing

George Kennan, American Diplomacy 1951

• “A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue.”

George Kennan, American Diplomacy 1951

• “Democracy fights in anger -- it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it -- to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end.”

George Kennan, American Diplomacy 1951

• “This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin:

George Kennan, American Diplomacy 1951

• “he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath -- in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat.”

George Kennan, American Diplomacy 1951

• “You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.”

“he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment”

• February 15, 1898, “Remember the Maine. To hell with Spain.

• May 7, 1915, " the Lusitania was sunk without warning."

• December 7, 1941, “A date that will live in infamy . . .”

• September 11, 2001, “Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember . . .- President George W. Bush, November 11, 2001

• Our enemies have made the mistake that America’s enemies always make. They saw liberty and thought they saw weakness. And now, they see defeat.- George W. Bush, President of the United States

Florida History Content Standards

• 11.4 Students trace the rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century.

• List the purpose and the effects of the Open Door policy. • Describe the Spanish-American War and U.S. expansion in the

South Pacific. • Discuss America's role in the Panama Revolution and the building

of the Panama Canal. • Explain Theodore Roosevelt's Big Stick diplomacy, William Taft's

Dollar Diplomacy, and Woodrow Wilson's Moral Diplomacy, drawing on relevant speeches.

• Analyze the political, economic, and social ramifications of World War I on the home front.

• Trace the declining role of Great Britain and the expanding role of the United States in world affairs after World War II.

America in the Intersection

• the U.S. Senate version of the proposed the U.S. Senate version of the proposed new federal "Higher Education Act" (S. new federal "Higher Education Act" (S. 1614) that defines "traditional 1614) that defines "traditional American history" as "significant American history" as "significant constitutional, political, intellectual, constitutional, political, intellectual, economic and foreign policy trends and economic and foreign policy trends and issues that have shaped the course of issues that have shaped the course of American history. . . key episodes, American history. . . key episodes, turning points, and leading figures," turning points, and leading figures,"

key episodes, turning points, and leading figures

Historical Turning Points

Some examples of Historical Turning Points

But How do we teach Turning Points?

and their resulting pile ups. . .

CSI: Historical Accident Reconstruction

• Welcome South Florida Historical Accident Investigators. This morning we will be discussing historical crime scene accident interpretation and reconstruction.

Part One: Red Light Green Light• How do I define a historical

intersection?• How do I simulate a historical

intersection for my students?• How do I use historical

fingerprinting along with historical accident reconstruction?

• Last but not least, how do I avoid being Dennis Fung?

Teaching in Intersections• intersect• One entry found. • Main Entry:• to pierce or divide by passing

through or across : cross <a comet intersecting earth's orbit> <one line intersects another>

• intransitive verb • 1 : to meet and cross at a point

<lines intersecting at right angles>

• 2 : to share a common area : overlap <where morality and self-interest intersect>

Red Light Green Light as a method of document analysis.

• Red light Green light is a method of document analysis that allows students to practice reading comprehension skills and document analysis in a group setting.

Red Light Green Light: The Scenario

Red Light Green Light: The Scenario

Imagine that the power has gone out in the city and four cars are sitting at a busy four way intersection. They have all arrived at the same time. There are no police officers around. No authorities to consult . . .

Who should go first? What are the Economic, Social and

Political ramifications of their decision to move forward? What if they fail to move?

This reinforces the concept of agency . . . that historical actors have and make choices.

Document Choices At least three sides GreenGreen: A side that wants

things to change (go) Red: A side that wants

things to remain the same (stop)

YellowYellow: those trapped at the light on caution

Lastly, the individual who has moved into the intersection.

Elementary and Middle School Teachers should emphasize Core Democratic Values for Elementary Students

NCSS Core Democratic Values

Life - Each Citizen has the right to the protection of their life. Truth - The government and citizens should not lie.

The Pursuit of Happiness - Each citizen can find happiness in their own way, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.

Common Good - Citizens should work together for the good of all.  The government should make laws that are good for everyone.

Liberty - Liberty includes the freedom to believe what you want, freedom to choose your own friends, to express your ideas and opinions in public, the right for people to meet in groups, and the right to have any lawful job or business.

Equality - Everyone should get the same treatment regardless of where their parents or grandparents were born, race, religion, or how much money you have, citizens all have political, social, and economic equality.

Justice - All people should be treated fairly in getting advantages and disadvantages of our country.  No group or person should be favored.

Diversity - Differences in language, race, religion, dress, food, and heritage are not only allowed but accepted as important.

Popular Sovereignty - The power of the government comes from the people.

Patriotism - A devotion to our country and the core democratic values.

Intersections inevitably create other Intersections

Abraham Lincoln in Four Intersections

• Emancipation • Reconstruction

• The Secession Crisis • Commander in Chief

Lyndon Baines Johnson in Four Intersections

• War on Poverty • War in Vietnam

• A National Tragedy • Civil Rights

History is about navigating Intersections.

Reconstruction

Chapter One: What Does the Black Man Want?

Frederick Douglass in the Intersection

America at the crossroads: Reconstruction

• The impulse toward segregation sprang from the same question posed during the war

Frederick Douglass in the Intersection

• Women’s Suffrage • Responsibility

• Civil Rights • Emancipation

Primary Source Integration: Frederick Douglass

• At the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, April, 1865, Douglass delivered the following speech on the subject: The Equality of all men before the law; Note that this was given within days of the close of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln.

What the Black Man Wants (1865)• What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer

from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don't disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box, let him alone, don't disturb him! [Applause.]

What the Black Man Wants (1865)• If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him

alone,--your interference is doing him a positive injury. Gen. Banks' "preparation" is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. [Applause.] Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live.

Six Degrees of SegregationThe 14th Amendment: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of

citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of

law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Unfair labor

Employment

Disfranchisement

Voting RightsJim Crow Justice

1896

Plessy v. Ferguson

Accommodations

PublicEducation

Segregation

Residential

1883

The Civil Rights Cases

1865-1870

The Civil War Amendments

Florida History is the nation’s history

• American History and the history of Florida in three Intersections.

Teachable Moments: Haiti in the Intersection

• “What were the major causes and effects of various expansionary times in U.S. history; i.e., territorially, economically, and/or politically?”

Fingerprinting Intersections

New Orleans and Haiti

The Black Jacobins

General Jean Jacques Dessalines, 1804. “Live free or die” • “It is not enough to have expelled from your

country the barbarians who have bloodied it for two centuries; it is not enough to have put a brake to these ever reviving factions which take turns to play-act this liberty, like ghost that France had exposed before your eyes; it is necessary, by a last act of national authority, assure forever an empire of liberty in this country our birth place; we must take away from this inhumane government, which held for so long our spirits in the most humiliating torpor, all hope to resubjugate us; we must at last live independent or die.

• Independence or death... May these sacred words bring us together, and may they be the signal of our struggles and of our gathering.

• Citizens, my compatriots, I have gathered in this solemn day these courageous servicemen, who on the eve of harvesting the last crotchets rest of liberty, have given their blood to save it; these generals who led your efforts against tyranny, have not yet done enough for your well being...The French name still glooms our countryside.”

Sacred Words: Maybe . . . Sacred Source . . . not so much.

Haiti in the Intersection• In 1804, after Jefferson's

landslide reelection for a second term, the president's son in law, Congressmen John W. Eppes of Virginia, rose in Congress to declare that U.S. merchants should have nothing to do with people of a race Americans needed "to depress and keep down." Congress soon concurred and passed a law prohibiting all trade with Haiti, which Jefferson signed. This ukase guaranteed Haiti's isolation for most of the nineteenth century, during which it became the poverty-ridden coup-tormented mess it remains today.

Haiti in the Intersection

• One of the few who objected to the Eppes-Jefferson policy was Federalist Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts. This forerunner of the Republican Party, who hated Jeffersonian democracy so much he wanted New England to secede from the Union, attacked the trade ban, claiming that the Haitians were only guilty of having "a skin not colored like our own."

Haiti in the Intersection

The Louisiana Purchase in the Intersection

Upton Sinclair in the Intersection: The Jungle Yohuru Williams, Teaching U.S. History Beyond the Textbook, p.76.

Andrew Jackson in the Intersection

The Acquisition of Spanish Florida

Remember Spanish Florida 1819 This episode in

American History could easily be called Andrew Jackson in the Intersection . . .

Manifest Destiny in the Intersection

Osceola in the intersection

The United States may have purchased Florida from Spain, but that meant little to many natives like Osceola an Alabama Creek who joined the Seminole tribe during the Second Seminole War from 1835 -1842 against the United States.

Osceola in the intersection The government wanted to relocate the

tribe to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. In 1837, Osceola agreed to peace talks with the American military under a flag of truce but the meeting proved to be subterfuge and General Thomas Jessup had him imprisoned instead. Osceola passed away soon afterward.

Florida in the Intersection

Mexico was not the first time slavery and expansion would be linked. During the Seminole War American military commanders worried what impact the so called “Black Seminoles” would have on slavery. "This, you may be assured,” warned General Thomas Sydney Jessup in a candid letter after being appointed to head up the Government’s campaign against the Seminoles, “is a negro, not an Indian war; and if it be not speedily put down, the south will feel the effects of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.”

The First Emancipation Proclamation? “[T]hat all Negroes the property of the

Seminole...who...delivered themselves up to the Commanding Officer of the Troops should be free."

- General Jesup

It was remarkable. By making a battlefield decision to offer freedom to blacks who surrendered, Jesup enacted the first and only emancipation of rebellious blacks on American soil prior to the Civil War. The largest, most organized, and most violent slave uprising in U.S. history had produced a concession of freedom. In essence, the Black Seminole portion of the uprising was a victory.

“Jesup's Proclamation” “Jesup's Proclamation,” as it came to be known, pre-

dated Lincoln's by twenty-five years. In more ways than one the Black Seminoles were pioneers on the American frontier. Jesup didn't do this out of abolitionist spirit. He did it for very pragmatic reasons.

“The negroes,” he confided in a letter, “have, for their numbers, been the most formidable foe, more bloodthirsty, active, and revengeful, than the Indians .... The negro, returned to his original owner, might have remained a few days, when he again would have fled to the swamps, more vindictive than ever.... Ten resolute negroes, with a knowledge of the country, are sufficient to desolate the frontier, from one extent to the other."

Showing Crossovers: White Out

• What conflict led to the following Congressional decree:

• “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.”

Did you say the Civil War?The Wilmot Proviso, 1846Provided, territory from That, as an express and fundamental

condition to the acquisition of any the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted

[Passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, 1846 and 1847, never passed by the U.S. Senate]

Nature: Florida in the Intersection

“What were the major causes and effects of various expansionary times in U.S. history; i.e., territorially, economically, and/or politically?”

Florida in the Intersection

• It had not been a good year for South Florida. A wild real-estate boom had collapsed. Millionaires had become poor folks. Solid citizens skipped monthly payments and tax bills - and lost their homes. Businesses failed.

• The sun still shone, but its rays bounced off the bleaching skeletons of unfinished buildings. Where had the good times gone?

Chapter Two: The “Cane” that made Florida Able

Florida in the Intersection

Florida Progressivism

Economic Boom and Bust• It had not been a good year

for South Florida. A wild real-estate boom had collapsed. Millionaires at the end of 1925 had become poor folks by the middle of 1926. Solid citizens skipped monthly payments and tax bills - and lost their homes. Businesses failed.

• The sun still shone, but its rays bounced off the bleaching skeletons of unfinished buildings. Where had the good times of the Roaring '20s gone?

The Eye of the Storm

• Oh, well, thought battered Floridians, things couldn't get worse.

• And then they did, on Sept. 18, 1926.

• From out of the Caribbean a storm, described by the U.S. Weather Bureau in Miami as "probably the most destructive hurricane ever to strike the United States," hit Fort Lauderdale, Dania, Hollywood, Hallandale and, most viciously of all, Miami.

Storm Front

• In the storm's eerie darkness, winds as high as 150 miles per hour, resulting in the deaths of between 325 and 650 people. More than 800 others were never accounted for. Property damage was the worst in U.S. history, at that time.

The Big Blow

• Striking some 25 years before hurricanes were named, the 1926 storm became known in South Florida simply as The Hurricane or The Big Blow, a ghoulish honor it held until Andrew struck on Aug. 24, 1992.

Pennsylvania newspaper headline: "Southeastern Florida Wiped Out.”

Historical Fingerprinting

"Southeastern Florida Wiped Out.”

Fingerprinting a Disaster• Chart: ''Power to Destroy''

Researchers have retraced the paths of hurricanes since 1900 to estimate how much destruction they would cause if they hit today.

HURRICANE DAMAGE, IN BILLIONS

1. 1926 -- Great Miami: $129.7 2. 2005 -- Katrina: 80.0 3. 1900 -- Galveston: 53.1 4. 1992 -- Andrew: 50.8 5. 1915 -- Storm 2: 50.2 6. 1938 -- New England: 35.0 7. 1944 -- Storm 9: 34.3 8. 1928 -- Lake Okeechobee: 30.3 9. 1960 -- Donna: 23.9 10. 1969 -- Camille: 19.2

Environmental

• Agriculture• Business• Industry• Politics• Society

Technological Marvel

• Hurricane Andrew, striking a heavily built-up area of South Florida with nearly 10 times the population of 1926, did far more property damage - in excess of $22 billion. But better forecasting, instant communications and tougher building codes brought one striking change: a death toll of 56.

Historical Fingerprinting

“What were the major causes and effects of various expansionary times in U.S. history; i.e., territorially, economically, and/or politically?”

Excavating Local History:Three Newspapers

Intersections create other intersections

Chapter Three:Civil Rights• Exploring a political expansion: the Civil Rights Movement in South Florida. “What were the major causes and effects of various expansionary times in U.S. history; i.e., territorially, economically, and/or politically?”

Civil Rights as a political frontier/intersection

South Florida

• Home on leave from the Navy Morris Thomas refused this Tallahassee bus driver's request to move to the back of the bus. Thomas lived in Midway, but heard about a possible demonstration and wanted to participate. Unaware that it had been called off on December 27, 1956 he refused to give up his seat.

Dade County: Virginia Beach

Miami Overton (1980)

• Twenty-three years later it was another soldier, ex Marine Arthur Duffy, whose death at the hands of police sparked one of the worst riots in American History. Eighteen people died during three weeks of rioting. The beating and the trial and the riots scarred the city for years.

Miami Overton 1980

• The violence changed the physical landscape of the city.

• The political climate. • And its economic

base

Turning Points• "It is a central, pivotal part of my life,"

Hanlon said last month in an interview at the Miami Dade Courthouse. "I did things I shouldn't have done and I failed to do things I should have done. Does that weigh heavy? Of course it does. I am burdened by that."

• But he insisted he has become a better man - a good man, even - in the decades since the McDuffie killing.

• "I recognize my role. I recognize what I have done," said Hanlon. "I have tried to do everything I can to reconcile it.

• "Am I the same person that I was 27 years ago? Of course not. This was a catalyst for me. It was a recognition of my need to atone both personally and spiritually."