Day 9

Our final trip up the New York subway went far more smoothly (for most of us) than previous trips with our large group.  We arrived at the New York Historical Society, the oldest museum in the country, and were eventually shown to the room where we would receive our private instruction for the day.  After a brief introduction, we were whisked away by our tour guide, Richard, on a whirlwind tour of the thousands of artifacts in the museum’s collection.  Although he moved quickly due to our limited time, Richard gave us some great information on a handful of the pieces, and he led the group using the inquiry process with which we have become very familiar over the past week.  The most interesting pieces we viewed, in my opinion, were a set of “slave badges” issued to southern slaves in free territories to designate their status in society.  Richard eventually handed the tour over to Mia, who guided us through a great lesson where we each picked a different artifact and then observed it before writing a few guiding questions regarding how it related to slavery.  I picked a case of boot black which may or may have come from the antebellum era.  Regardless of the exact date of production, the images on the front of the box provided a fantastic indicator of white perceptions of black culture in the United States.  I will certainly be using this activity when having my students analyze primary source documents and artifacts from history, as writing their own questions is a great way to develop their higher order thinking skills and to further develop their ability to evaluate.

The “Slavery in New York” and “New York Divided” exercises provided other great tools we can use in the classroom.  Mia stressed the importance of observing an artifact before interpreting it, and how our first impressions are not always the most reliable.  She provided some wonderful background information on topics such as the Anti-Abolitionist Riots of 1834 and the emergence of New York’s black middle class in the early Nineteenth Century.  I can honestly say that I had no idea how entangled New York’s economy was with the southern cotton trade, where 38 cents of every dollar of profit earned from cotton stayed in New York.  After learning this, it becomes obvious why New Yorkers retained such pro-southern opinions in the years leading up to the Civil War, and then remained split during the war itself.  The investigative activity on Jacob Ellis (a/k/a William Dixon) was a great lesson for students which I can use in conjunction with the numerous other materials provided by the museum to promote the investigative process in the classroom.  Some of the other materials they generously provided include a DVD of multisensory activities and hundreds of primary source documents.

After a final cheese steak at a New York deli and a rather rushed stop at the Museum of Natural History, (I’ll have to peruse their website for a few lesson plans) I headed back downtown for a stop by the New York Stock Exchange where an old friend gave me a quick tour of the trading floor.  Ground Zero and the new building and memorial park currently under construction were my final stop before heading back to Brooklyn to catch up on some late-night blogging.  As great as our trip to the city has been, I can’t wait to head upstate tomorrow, especially to Sagamore Hill and the home of Teddy Roosevelt.

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