Overview of Grades 8-12 Curriculum

This page offers guidance for engaging students with the Grades 8-12-focused pages on the, “Communitarian Experiment,” part of the larger, “Radical Equality: 1842-1846″ exhibit about the utopian abolitionist community, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI). Find two richly resourced, interactive grades 8-12 lessons.

Lesson: A Window into the Communitarian Moment

• Examine, corroborate, and discuss sources on the movement to create an intentional community.
• Consider why and how people create change in society, and how local events relate to national history
• Analyze Frederick Douglass’ 1852 Independence Day speech See this lesson on the radical abolitionist group that included Sojourner Truth. 

Lesson: Creating a Utopian Community

• Design a utopian community informed by ideals and experiences of the NAEI See this lesson on designing a utopian community. 

HANDOUTS AND WORKSHEETS

All of the materials needed for these lessons are available to download on the Downloads page.

ABOUT THIS STORY

Reliable secondary sources provide context that helps make sense of evidence from the past: documents, artifacts, and images called primary sources. Who made the items that we are studying? Why? Where did they come from? What was happening around them?

What makes these secondary sources reliable?

All of our sources are directly based on extensive research by veteran scholars led by Kerry Buckley of Historic Northampton and Christopher Clark at the University of Connecticut.