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Judgment Day
Part 1: 1450-1750
Part 2: 1750-1805
Part 3: 1791-1831
<---Part 4: 1831-1865


Narrative | Resource Bank | Teacher's Guide



Judgment Day
The Narrative orients you to the history and historical resources of this era. The Resource Bank provides annotated images and documents, stories, biographics, and commentaries. The Teacher's Guide helps you use the web site and TV series in U.S. history courses.


[W]hat northerners were saying now is they didn't want slavery to be part of the future in the West, because slavery would threaten their values, their sense of a work ethic. They were especially concerned that wherever slavery went it tended to degrade the meaning of labor. It tended to degrade the meaning of liberty itself.... Was a civil war inevitable over slavery in America? No. A war was not necessarily inevitable over slavery in America, but a deep conflict over slavery was. Any nation ... that founds itself on the creeds of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right of revolution, the doctrine of consent and the doctrine of equality, and yet develops one of the largest systems of human bondage in the world, is living a national life of contradiction.

- David Blight, historian




Part 4: Narrative | Resource Bank Contents | Teacher's Guide

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