By Thom Thacker and Michael A. An art contest is used as the basis from which students can examine primary historical documents advertisements for runaway slaves to gain a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery in the North. Lesson by Bill Bigelow and student reading by Howard Zinn. Interactive activity introduces students to the history and often untold story of the U. Roles available in Spanish. By Gilda L. Reflections on teaching students about the walkouts by Chicano students in California.
A role play on the history of the Vietnam War that is left out of traditional textbooks. By Bill Bigelow and Linda Christensen. Empathy, or "social imagination," allows students to connect to "the other" with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in common. Rethinking the U. By Bob Peterson. A role play on the Constitutional Convention which brings to life the social forces active during and immediately following the American Revolution with focus on two key topics: suffrage and slavery.
By Doug Sherman. The author describes how he uses biographies and film to introduce students to the role of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement beyond the familiar heroes. He emphasizes the role and experiences of young people in the Movement.
Related Resources. Teaching Activities Free. Following the Revolutionary War, merchants in Europe and America felt a need to rein in the enormous debts they were owed, refusing further loans while also demanding payment in cash for any future goods and services. This demand for hard-currency caused a chain reaction, eventually placing the average American borrower under unrealistic schedules of payment given the small amount of cash in circulation.
As rural farmers began to lose land and property to debt collectors, hostile sentiments boiled over, especially among those owed payment for military service. In September , Henry Lee wrote to Washington that the restlessness was "not confined to one state or to one part of a state," but rather affected "the whole.
Protests in western Massachusetts grew more tumultuous in August after the convening of the state legislature failed to address any of the numerous petitions it had received concerning debt relief. Daniel Shays quickly rose among the ranks of the dissidents, having participated in the protest at Northampton courthouse in late August.
Shays' followers called themselves "Regulators," in reference to a reform movement in North Carolina that occurred two decades earlier. In response to the growing crisis, Washington wrote desperately to Humphreys, worried that "commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them.
By December , the conflict between eastern Massachusetts creditors and western rural farmers escalated. Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin mobilized a force of 1, militiamen to counter Shays. The army was led by former Continental Army General Benjamin Lincoln and funded by private merchants. Americans had suffered hard economic blows during the war and now were excluded from traditional trade within the British Empire.
The financial crisis in Massachusetts was especially severe because of a scarcity of currency and attempts by the Commonwealth to liquidate its war loans quickly through heavy taxation. The subsistence farmers and small-scale artisans in central and western Massachusetts found themselves in a particularly difficult position--mired in personal debt and resulting lawsuits and oppressed by heavy state taxes levied on behalf of wealthy speculators who controlled much of the outstanding state debt.
At the same time, onerous property qualifications for voting or holding office, and the high cost of maintaining local representatives at meetings of the state legislature in faraway Boston meant that the citizens of central and western Massachusetts—including many veterans of the war that had made the new nation—found themselves with no say in a distant state government. Their grievances, which had been growing since the Revolution, were marked by protests, public debates, riots, and interference with local officials and courts to prevent legal action from being taken against debtors and riotous behavior , but events only boiled over into violent resistance in Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, first came to prominence in September when a group of insurgents closed the state court then meeting at Springfield, Massachusetts, and threatened to seize the federal arsenal located there.
At the same time, a large force under General Benjamin Lincoln, recruited in the eastern part of Massachusetts and funded by wealthy eastern merchants, was advancing on Springfield to relieve Shepard. Only a little more than three years after the end of the Revolution, a new rebellion seemed about to begin.
If so, the plan to strike before Lincoln arrived with reinforcements failed. The loose confederation of local commanders who led the Regulators could not coordinate their operations and the Shaysites were routed by artillery fire during a brief but deadly skirmish at the Springfield Arsenal in which three rebels were killed and another mortally wounded.
Citizens of Massachusetts had killed each other over their political differences. Federalist leaders at the state and national level, including George Washington, saw the agrarian unrest in Massachusetts as a danger to national unity. They desired a strong national government to prevent a descent into anarchy.
Benjamin Franklin, the chief executive of Pennsylvania, offered to send troops to Massachusetts to support the state government and his old friend, Governor James Bowdoin. Other members of the Revolutionary generation were more sanguine.
Some rebel leaders who could not be caught were tried in absentia. Sixteen men were sentenced to death, but later pardoned; two others were hanged for property crimes related to the insurgency. Thousands of Regulators were forced to take oaths of allegiance to the state in order to regain their civil rights. Although he was never tried, Daniel Shays was pardoned by Massachusetts in He never returned from exile, however, living first in Vermont and then in Scottsburg in western New York, where he finally secured a pension as a Revolutionary soldier and died in This revolt had far reaching local and national consequences.
Governor James Bowdoin was voted out of office in the election—defeated by John Hancock, a Boston merchant who had managed to maintain his popularity as a Revolutionary leader—and the Commonwealth moved quickly to conciliate the rebels. At the same time, exaggerated reports of anarchy in Massachusetts moved national leaders to call for a constitutional convention in Philadelphia to reform the weak national government.
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