1. The first assignment is to watch this graphic map of our nation expanding, as we add slave states vs. free states. Be sure you understand when (and how) new states were added to the US. Review your reading in A People and a Nation for these events: Missouri Compromise (in Chapter 8), Wilmot Proviso, Compromise of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.
2. Read the Wilmot Proviso. *This is an article that is located on D2L (Materials --> Content)
3. The Pro-Slavery Position. (It would likely be helpful to read P&N Chapter 9 again, starting on p. 248). Please note: these were newspaper articles written by those who owned enslaved people! They were trying to justify their behavior. These are assigned so you can have a sense of the "intellectual history" of the time period. They are NOT assigned to try to suggest there was anything actually positive about slavery.
3a.
Southerners' Defense #1
3b.
Southerners' Defense #2
3c.
Southerners' Defense #3
4. Historians discuss abolitionism (the anti-slavery movement) For information on the early aspects of this movement, be sure to review P&N Chapter 8, pp. 223
4a. Eric Foner on the abolitionist movement
