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A Calculated Act | The African Americans

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This video from The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross offers an overview of Homer Plessy’s act of civil disobedience and the resulting Supreme Court case.

The Rise of Nationalism

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In this video from Finding Your Roots, Tina Fey learns about an ancestor who fought to free Greece from four centuries of Ottoman rule. The resource helps students understand the rise of nationalism in Europe in the 19th century.

Robert Smalls: From Slavery to Politics

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This video from Slavery and the Making of America explores the life of Robert Smalls. From the middle to the late 19th century Smalls, a former slave, went from decorated solider in the Union Army to becoming a landowner and eventually a powerful politician during the period of Reconstruction.

Lucy Laney

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This video segment from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow addresses the life and impact of Lucy Laney, the founder of the Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta, Georgia. Laney was an influential Jim Crow-era educator. She believed it was essential to cultivate the minds of her students in order to develop intellectual leaders for the future, especially black women who could then teach the next generation.

Concepts Unwrapped: Self-serving Bias

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This video from Ethics Unwrapped introduces the behavioral ethics bias known as the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias causes us to see things in ways that support our best interests and our pre-existing points of view. Support materials include discussion quesions, case study, and teaching tips.

This video/case study is provided by Ethics Unwrapped and is a free educational resource from The University of Texas at Austin.

Holocaust in Plunge

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This video from the PBS series The Story of the Jews examines the effects of the brutal occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany in 1941 through the lens of a survivor and the last Jew in the town of Plunge, Jakovas Bunka. Bunka was conscripted into the Russian Red Army, but when he returned to Plunge after the war, his family was among the 96% of the town’s population massacred by the Nazis. Today, he carves wood figurines depicting shtetl residents as a memorial to the Holocaust.

Cauca's Most Valuable Resources

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In this video segment from Women, War & Peace, Cauca, a resource-rich region in Colombia, is introduced. Cauca and nearby La Toma, a gold-filled mountain, are volatile areas due to their abundant natural resources. Many people are looking to take advantage of the resources in Cauca and La Toma, and the Afro-Columbian communities that have lived in these areas for centuries are now threatened by the potential investors. Without support from the Colombian government, these communities may cease to exist.

John Janey: The Courage to Flee and to Fight

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Learn about actor Courtney B. Vance’s ancestor, an enslaved man named John Janey, who ran away to freedom and later fought on the Union side during the Civil War in this video from Finding Your Roots. Through newspaper archives, Underground Railroad chronicles, and military records, a dramatic story begins to unfold about the epic life of a true American hero.

The Birth of a Nation

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In this video from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, learn about the film The Birth of a Nation. This 1915 silent film was adapted from the novel The Clansman, which dramatized southern life in the period of Reconstruction. The story presents Ku Klux Klan members as noble men and vilifies southern black men as sexual predators of white women. While the N.A.A.C.P. tried desperately to have the film banned, it was to no avail. After the film's release, rampant white violence against black men spread across the South.

The Supreme Court | A New Kind of Justice

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Explore the creation, intention, and language of the Fourteenth Amendment in this video, from the series The Supreme Court. One of the most enduring outcomes of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, promised the government would protect the rights of citizens of the United States. While Congress was given explicit rights through the Amendment to protect newly freed slaves in former Confederate states, the language of the Amendment sometimes presented ambiguities. This video, from the series The Supreme Court, explores how far the federal government could go to ensure the “privileges or immunities” of citizenship.

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