Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 8

Compare and Contrast: Within these five documents there is evidence that sheds light on the experiences of both free and enslaved African Americans in the early nineteenth century. Both groups were obviously subjected to severe discrimination, but what do the sources reveal about the ways their status shaped the lives and experiences of both free blacks and slaves? What did the two groups share, and how did they differ? How did the legacy of slavery continue to influence the lives of freed people?

Explore Whites’ Interactions with African Americans: These five documents contain a range of information that sheds light on the ways that whites in the United States in the early Republic interacted with African Americans. What do they reveal about the dominant views that most white Americans internalized about blacks? What do they suggest about how some whites questioned and deviated from the dominant ideology?

Explore Internalization of Social Values: What do these five sources suggest about the extent to which free and enslaved African Americans in the early Republic internalized or accepted the racist ideas and values of American society, and in what ways did they resist and reject those values? What do the sources suggest about the factors that made it possible for them to resist the power and effects of white America’s messages about blackness?

Evaluate the Impact of Audience: Each of these documents was created with a particular audience in mind. What was the intended audience for each source? How does the intended audience shape each source, and to what extent does its purpose affect each document’s reliability?