Tag: African American education

Booklet, hat and patches on a table top.

Andersonville is Black History and Reconstruction History (even when the National Park Service Forgets)

Junior Ranger programs are popular educational activities at our national parks. Children complete a short exercise connected to the park’s theme and receive a badge. The best junior ranger programs provoke age-appropriate revelation about the big picture without merely simplifying the material presented to adults. Andersonville National Historic Site’s standing ...
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Editors's Note for June 2023 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2023 JCWE

Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past ...
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Title page of slave narrative

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

As a public historian working in St. Louis, Missouri, I am sometimes asked whether enslaved people living here before the Civil War ran away more frequently than enslaved people in the Deep South. Enslaved St. Louisians had the free state of Illinois across the Mississippi River, after all. While an ...
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