New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance
Volume 5 Number 2 Summer-Fall, 2005

The “New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance” curriculum guide was developed as part of the “Gateway to the City” project, a recipient of a Department of Education Teaching American History grant. The project was a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education, the Brooklyn Historical Society and Hofstra University.The curriculum guide is designed to support the New York State human rights curriculum, state learning standards, and document-based instruction in history.

A limited number of copies of the 268-page curriculum guide are available from Alan Singer, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, 128 Hagedorn Hall, 119 Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549. The full guide with additional documents is available at http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/alan_j_singer.

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Table of Contents of Summary:

• Introduction - New York and Slavery: Complicity and Resistance
• Whom do we choose to commemorate?
• What was life like for Africans in the New Amsterdam colony?
• What was life like for enslaved Africans during the colonial era?
• How did slavery develop into a formal institution in the British colony of New York?
• What was life like for enslaved Africans at Lloyd Manor on Long Island?
• What is the New York City African Burial Ground Memorial?
• What was life like for enslaved Africans in the Hudson Valley during the colonial era?
• How did African Americans in New York resist slavery in the colonial era?
• How did the British Colony of New York seek to control enslaved Africans?
• The New York City Slave Conspiracy Trial (1741): Who were the guilty parties?
• Where did New York’s “Founders” stand on the abolition of slavery?
• What was life like for African Americans in upstate New York?
• What were race relations like in Brooklyn (Kings County)?
• Why did New Yorkers debate voting rights for African Americans?
• What role did White New Yorkers play in the battle over slavery as the nation approached Civil War?
• Why did the Fugitive Slave Law spur resistance to slavery in New York State?
• Frederick Douglass: Should African Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?
• What was New York State’s role on the Underground Railroad?
• John Brown: Martyr or Religious Fanatic? Freedom fighter or traitor and terrorist?
• What was New York City’s role in the illegal 19th century trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?
• How did New York City’s economic and political elite respond to the threat of Southern Secession?