Page 151 - 1619 Project Curriculum

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Excerpt “Slavery leapt out of the East and into the interior lands of the Old Southwest in
the 1820s and 1830s.”

“As new lands in the Old Southwest were pried open, white enslavers back east
realized their most profitable export was no longer tobacco or rice. A complex
interstate slave trade became an industry of its own. This extractive system,
together with enslavers moving west with human property, resulted in the
relocation of approximately one million enslaved black people to a new region.
The entrenched practice of buying, selling, owning, renting and mortgaging
humans stretched into the American West along with the white settler-colonial
population that now occupied former indigenous lands.”

Key Names, Indian Removal Act of 1830, Mexican-American War, Westward Expansion
Dates, and
Terms

Guiding 1. How was the expansion of the U.S. shaped and made possible by slave
Questions labor?
2. When did free black Americans begin to travel west, and why?

3. “Capitalism”​ by Matthew Desmond (pages 30–40)
​

Excerpt “In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the
country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) lives in
poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.).”

“Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and
unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But
recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia
and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace
of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.”

Key Names, 2008 economic crisis, assets, capitalism, Collateralized Debt Obligations
Dates, and (C.D.O.s), cotton gin, credit, creditor, debts, depreciation, Industrial
Terms Revolution, investor, labor union, Louisiana Purchase, mortgage, Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.), Panic of 1837, stock

These materials were created to support ​The 1619 Project​, published in ​The New York Times Magazine​ August
2019. You can find this and more educational resources at ​www.pulitzercenter.org/1619