See your professor’s Canvas page for instructions on using these research kits. The kits contain links to primary and secondary sources on the topics listed below and will be used to write your second paper.
Please note: the links in these kits go to either
- a source on the web
- an OU Libraries’ resource, requiring you to login with your OUNetID (4×4), or
- a companion Canvas page, requiring you to enroll here before you can access the document.
The links open in a new window/tab. Report link problems to lscrivener@ou.edu.
1741 New York Slave Uprisings
In the spring of 1741, a series of suspicious fires frightened white New Yorkers. They were certain that the fires were set by Black slaves or by members of the multi-racial poor community in the city. In 1741, New York City had the second-largest slave population of any city in the Thirteen Colonies. This fact, combined with a series of rumored and real slave rebellions all over the south, made white New Yorkers anxious. Certain that Blacks and their poor white allies were plotting murder and arson against them, White officials tried to restrict Blacks from gathering together and they offered rewards — freedom for slaves or indentured servants and cash for free people — to anyone who would name names.
Accusations poured out, convincing New Yorkers of a gigantic plot. They had a series of trials, at which the accused universally claimed innocence. In the end, 18 Black New Yorkers were hung, five white Catholics were burned at the stake, and 70 slaves were deported from the colony. Historians still argue about how much of the plot was real, but New Yorkers certainly believed Black slaves threatened them. –Prof. Anne Hyde
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
“The New York Conspiracy of 1741.” History Now. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (Companion Canvas page.)
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Lepore, Jill. “Preface, Prologue, and Chapter 2.” In New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, 5-14. 40-63. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. (Companion Canvas page.)
The Boston Massacre, 1770
On the evening of March 5, 1770, a mob of rowdy Bostonians taunted and abused British soldiers on guard duty outside of the Customs House. As tensions escalated, soldiers fired into the crowd. When the smoke cleared, four men were dead; a fifth later died from his injuries. In the aftermath of the event, the British soldiers were put on trial and acquitted for their actions, in large part due to their defense attorney, Boston lawyer John Adams. Nevertheless, the so-called “Boston Massacre” became a compelling propaganda image for the emergent patriot movement to rally colonists to their side. In truth, how and why the violence unfolded that evening is more complicated and nuanced than a simple political dispute. This kit allows you to examine different accounts of the Boston Massacre and the ensuing trial to explore what actually happened in Boston that fateful night. –Prof. Lauren Duval
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
Images
Newspapers and Broadsides
The Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal, March 12, 1770, pp. 3-4.
“[Excerpt].” The London Chronicle, April 26-28, 1770.
“On the Trial of the Inhuman Murderers, Of the 5th of March, 1770.” Broadside. Boston, Mass. 1770.
“A Verse Occasioned by the late horrid Massacre in King-Street.” Broadside. Boston, Mass. 1770.
Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs
“George Hewes’ Recollection of the Boston Massacre.” History Matters. George Mason University.
Trials and Depositions
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- p. 1-38 [images 1-38]: a narrative overview and short descriptions of depositions
- p. 81-83 [images 119-121]: an index of depositions
- p. 39-80 [images 39-118]: primary source depositions.
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Zabin, Serena. “Intimate Ties and the Boston Massacre.” In Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, edited by Barbara Oberg, 192–210. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. (Companion Canvas page.)
The Siege of Boston, 1775-1776
After the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the British army retreated into the city of Boston where they were besieged by various state militias. A strategic move, this entrenchment nevertheless had drastic consequences for civilians who lived in and around Boston. Residing in a besieged city altered civilians’ lives in profound ways; they faced hunger, disease, property destruction, and the pervasive threat of violence and invasion as war raged around them, including the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. That same summer, the newly-appointed General George Washington arrived in Boston to take command of the new Continental Army. This research kit allows you to explore the intensifying military conflict in the early months of the Revolution through the daily lives and eyewitness accounts of the people who lived through this tumultuous period. –Prof. Lauren Duval
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
“Boston Town Meeting Minutes,” April 22, 1775. Massachusetts Historical Society.
Cheever, William. “A Boston Merchant’s, Diary, 1775-1776.” Massachusetts Historical Society.
“Letters between Abigail and John Adams,” 1775. Massachusetts Historical Society.
- Abigail to John, 18-20 June 1775
- Abigail to John, 22 June 1775
- Abigail to John, 25 June 1775
- Abigail to John, 5 July 1775
- John to Abigail, 7 July 1775
“Letters between Mercy Otis Warren and Hannah Winthrop,” 1774-1775. Massachusetts Historical Society.
- Winthrop to Warren (January 1774)
- Winthrop to Warren (May 1775)
- Warren to Winthrop (June 1775)
- Winthrop to Warren (August 1775)
“Letters from Mercy Otis Warren to John Adams,” 1775. Founders Online. National Archives and Records Administration.
“Siege of Boston: Eyewitness Accounts from the Collections.” Massachusetts Historical Society.”
Warren, Mercy Otis. The Blockheads: Or, The Affrighted Officers. A Farce. Boston: John Gill, 1776. (Companion Canvas page.)
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Excerpt from Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, 274–77. New York: Viking, 2013. (Companion Canvas page.)
Royster, Charles. “1776: The Army of Israel.” In A Revolutionary People At War, 54–126. University of North Carolina Press, 1979. (Companion Canvas page; read chapter and notes.)
The Haudenosaunee in the American Revolution, 1775-1794
During the American Revolution, both the new American government and the British sought to ally with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a centuries-old powerful confederacy of six allied nations located in present day New York: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, Senecas, Onondagas, and after 1713, a group of Tuscaroras driven from their homeland in what is currently Virginia and North Carolina by war and colonial oppression. Under the Great Law of Peace, the confederacy’s oral constitution, each nation retains its own governance, practices, and language, while uniting for common defense and the preservation of peace. Haudenosaunee, meaning, “people of the long house,” refers not only to the tribes’ traditional houses—which the confederacy symbolically evokes—but also to the kinship, harmony, and peacemaking that structures Haudenosaunee communities. The American Revolution, however, fractured the confederacy. Unable to agree on a unified strategy, most Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas allied with the British; many Oneidas and Tuscaroras sided with the American rebels. During the war, some of the Continental Army’s fiercest violence, notably the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, was directed at Haudenosaunee communities to punish British-allied tribes and deter them from challenging the westward expansion of the United States after the war—efforts which the Six Nations continued to resist long after the Revolution. This kit allows you to explore the Haudenosaunee’s diplomatic approaches to navigating the violence and disruption of the American Revolution and their postwar efforts to protect their lands from the encroachment of the new United States. –Prof. Lauren Duval
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
Choosing Sides
“Peacemaker Story [The Great Law of Peace].” In Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators., 2–3. [Washington, D.C.]: National Museum of the American Indian Education Office, 2009. (Pages 2-3 of document or 4-5 of PDF.)
“Speech to the Six Nations, December 7, 1776,” Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 6, 1010–1011, Library of Congress. (Companion Canvas page.)
“Speech to the Six Nations, December 3, 1777,” Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 9, 994–998, Library of Congress. (Companion Canvas page.)
“Board of War Report, June 11, 1778.” Journals of the Continental Congress, 587-591.
The Sullivan Expedition (1779)
The Journal of Lieut. John L. Hardenbergh of the Second New York Continental Regiment from May 1 to October 3, 1779, in General Sullivan’s Campaign against the Western Indians.Auburn, N.Y.: [Knapp & Peck, printers], 1879. (Contains multiple diaries, see especially chapter entitled, “Expedition Against the Cayugas.”)
An Uneasy Peace
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Freedom Suits in Revolutionary America
The American Revolution reinvigorated longstanding debates throughout the Anglo-American Atlantic world about Black liberty and the abolition of slavery. Before, during, and after the war, Black Americans, both enslaved and free, seized upon this moment to argue against the institution of slavery, and in the case of the enslaved, to advocate for their own freedom—often with reference to the revolutionaries’ assertion “that all men are created equal” and entitled to the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These petitions and writings were critical in undermining the institution of slavery, which was deeply embedded in the economies, households, and politics of the new nation. This kit allows you to explore Black freedom suits from the revolutionary era, as well as the writings of prominent Black intellectuals and thinkers from the years surrounding the American Revolution, as Black Americans sought to expand the conception of liberty and claim freedom for themselves, their families, and their communities. –Prof. Lauren Duval
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
“Belinda Sutton Petition, 1783.” The Royall House and Slave Quarters.
(Background information: “Belinda Sutton and Her Petitions.” The Royall House and Slave Quarters.)
“Charge of Chief Justice Cushing in the Quock Walker Case (1783).” Africans in America. PBS.
(Background information: Africans in America. PBS.)
“James Petitioned the General Assembly, November 30, 1786.” Library of Virginia.
(Background information: Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities.)
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Carden, Allen. “Stumbling Forward: Emancipation Proceeds in New England and Pennsylvania.” In Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865, 45–60. Chicago: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. (Notes to this chapter, scroll down.)
Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. “‘I Knew That If I Went Back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My Liberty’: Ona Judge Staines, the President’s Runaway Slave.” In Women in Early America, 225–45. New York: NYU Press, 2015. (Companion Canvas page.)
Nash, Gary B. “Could Slavery Have Been Abolished?” In The Forgotten Fifth, 69–122. Harvard University Press, 2006. (Companion Canvas page.)
Newman, Richard S., and Roy E. Finkenbine. “Black Founders in the New Republic: Introduction.” The William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2007): 83–94.
Schweninger, Loren. “Freedom Suits, African American Women, and the Genealogy of Slavery.” The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2014): 35–62.
Waldstreicher, David. “The Wheatleyan Moment.” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (2011): 522–51.
Creating A New Nation: The Constitutional Convention, 1787-1789
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five delegates met in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. The convention instead went far beyond this stated purpose and crafted a new governing document for the young nation: the Constitution. Both during the Constitutional Convention and in the subsequent ratification debates from 1787-1789, Americans deliberated the form and function of the federal government, the responsibilities and rights of citizens, how to protect those rights, and critically, who was entitled to those rights in the new nation. This kit will allow you to explore the process of creating and ratifying the Constitution by reading the journals of prominent politicians and the vibrant public debates between those who supported and opposed the document. –Prof. Lauren Duval
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
Madison, James. “The Federalist Papers : No. 10.” 1787. The Avalon Project. Yale Law School.
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Boonshoft, Mark. “Doughfaces at the Founding: Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Slavery, and the Ratification of the Constitution in New York.” New York History 93, no. 3 (2012): 187–218.
Politics and Family Life in the Early US, John and Abigail Adams, 1796-1797
John Adams was the second president of the United States. He took office in 1797 after George Washington, a stunning moment for the world because no republic had ever changed presidents or political parties without a war or a coup. The nation was in a disastrous financial condition. Adams wife, Abigail Smith Adams, was well-educated and politically talented. John counted on Abigail’s practical advice and political savvy during their entire lives. Their relationship was unusual as was the number of letters that has survived.
In the 1770s, John wrote to Abigail when his work for the circuit court took him away from home and when John served in the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1777. When he served as President and travelled between Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington DC, John and Abigail wrote to each other almost every day with frank advice and observations about what was going on in the new U.S. and in their private lives. The letters were often short notes but some were many, many pages. The letters here are from the first year of Adam’s Presidency in 1797. –Prof. Anne Hyde
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
“Thirty-Two Letters between John and Abigail Adams During His Presidency,” 1796-1797. Adams Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society.
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 27 November 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 27 November 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 4 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 4 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 7 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 8 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 9 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 12 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 14 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 16 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 18 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 19 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 20 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 22 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 23 December 1796, “I received by the last post…”
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 23 December 1796, “Mr. Beals will deliver this…”
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 25 December 1796
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 27 December 1796, “The inclosed extract of a Letter…”
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 27 December 1796, “I received yours of the 14…”
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 30 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 December 1796
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 1 January 1797
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1 January 1797
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 January 1797
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 5 January 1797, “I dined Yesterday…”
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 5 January 1797, “Mrs. Swan and her Daughters,…”
- Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 7 January 1797
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 9 January 1797
- Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 11 January 1797
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Lewis, Jan. “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic.” The William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1987): 689–721.
Slavery in Texas, 1836-1861
Texas, like other parts of the cotton south, was part of vast expansion of African slavery in the decades between 1820 and 1850. Because of the booming cotton industry, American slaveholders migrated to the Mexican province of Texas in the 1820s. They established a society like those developing at the same time in Mississippi and Alabama. Tensions quickly rose between these Anglo settlers and the government of Mexico, which repeatedly attempted to outlaw slavery in Texas, because slavery was illegal in the rest of Mexico. Settlers in the region eventually rebelled from Mexico in 1836 and established the Republic of Texas. From 1836 to 1845, slaveholders from the American South poured into this new nation between the borders of the United States and Mexico to protect the institution of slavery.
When Texas became a U.S. state in 1845, slavery, like other aspects of Texas, was different than in other parts of the US. Because slaves lived on isolated plantations, ranches, and farms, owners could treat them however they chose. However, because they lived close to Mexico, where slavery was illegal, it was also more possible for slaves to escape and run to Mexico. Slave owners in Texas worked very hard to create laws that protected their rights to own other humans and to get them back when slaves ran away. –Prof. Anne Hyde
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
“Slave Population from the Census,” Texas Slavery Project.
“Ten Letters,” James Perry Papers, 1830s. Texas Slavery Project.
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Families and Goldrushers on the Overland Trail, 1849-1851
In 1849, the news of a gold discovery in California was announced in President Polk’s last state of the union address. That news sent hundreds of thousands of young men to leave their homes and farms and to walk, ride mules or horses, or take wagons to California. Very few found gold and while many men stayed in California, most returned home with empty pockets.
Those young men joined a large movement of people already underway, families heading to Oregon and California to get a new start on new land. Because this was an adventure for everyone, goldrushers and overland trail families, and because everyone left friends and families at home, they wrote letters and kept diaries about this moment in their lives. The young men, and a few women, who went to find gold, had different expectations and problems when they began traveling and when they reached California. The families who traveled, mostly multigenerational and from the Midwest, had money and experience that goldrushers didn’t, but everyone faced new situations. –Prof. Anne Hyde
Primary Sources: Original Documents from the Time
Swain, William, and Swain, Sabrina. “Letters,” 1849-1851 . New Perspectives on the West. PBS.org. (Companion Canvas page.)
Watson, William J. Journal of an Overland Journey to Oregon Made in the Year 1849. Jacksonville: E.R. Roe, 1851.
Secondary Sources: What Historians Have Written
Holliday, J. S. “Preface.” In The World Rushed in: The California Gold Rush Experience, 2–12. Red River Books. Norman University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. (Companion Canvas page.)