This issue's "Middle Level Learning" section presents two articles. The first is "Harriet Tubman: Emancipate Yourself!" (by Steven S. Lapham and Peter Hanes). "Argo," which won the 2012 Oscar for best picture, was about a daring escape of six U.S. diplomats from Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis. Now imagine the…

Set during the Cold War and space race, this historical role-play focuses on Wernher von Braun's involvement in and culpability for the use of slave laborers to produce V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany. Students will grapple with two central questions. Should von Braun have been allowed to emigrate to the United States given his affiliation with the…

After the war in 1866, slaves became the owners of the lands they once farmed for their masters. The land they farmed became their own because of the nature of Creek citizenship and land tenure. The 1866 treaty of peace between the United States federal government and the Creek Nation (also known as the Muskogee Nation) declared that freed slaves…

The author went to a talk, part of a lecture series on abolitionism, by scholar Eric Foner. Foner's thesis was that the abolition movement was the foundation of virtually all social justice movements in the United States. Foner's talk about the significance of the abolition movement inspired the author to rethink how he had been approaching the…

Numerous empirical studies have been conducted to examine the factors that influence African American community college students' decisions to pursue a higher education. Studies have also examined the causes of the achievement gap between African-Americans and European American community college students. However, there is limited research about…

The accounts of two men who participated in several Spanish-led expeditions to the New World in the early 1500s document the frequent use of manual signs and gestures in the initial interactions between European explorers and the indigenous peoples of North America. Bernal Diaz del Castillo described the events that occurred during three…

Much has been written of the Navajo Long Walk period when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of "long walks" to Fort Sumner (Hweeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.…

Critical scholarship frequently depicts literacy education as an "initiation into passivity." Disconnected from the lives of students and reduced to strategies for scoring points on tests, literacy becomes an exercise in the reproduction of a moral economy of discipline, compliance, and productivity. Yet people also recognize that the modern world…

Current explanations for the gap between African-American and white school achievement are inadequate; most cannot explain the high level of black school achievement in the decade after Emancipation. Further, traditional accounts of the origins of educational discrimination against African-Americans are inaccurate. The roots of educational…

In this qualitative, ethnographic case study, I examine two Thai NGO shelters/schools working with human trafficking survivors and at-risk populations of children ages 5-18. The two NGOs had a residential component, meaning that children live at the shelter, and an educational component, meaning that children are taught academic and vocational…

Human trafficking and various other forms of child sexual exploitation on the United States-Mexico border are described from social science and law enforcement perspectives, including current laws and definitions, case examples, and descriptions of victims and traffickers. The Southern Border Initiative of the AMBER Alert Project is outlined as…

This article presents an interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard professor and cultural critic who has captured 25 million viewers with his PBS documentary series, African American Lives (WNET). Using genealogical research and DNA science, Gates traces the family history of 19 famous African Americans. What results is a rich and moving…

In this journal in 2007, the author and Alpesh Maisuria critiqued two central tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) from a Marxist perspective (Cole and Maisuria, 2007). These are its primacy of "race" over class, and its concept of "white supremacy". Part of the critique focused on the work of leading UK Critical Race Theorist,…

The "Dear America" series is one of the most successful brands in children's literature. It inspired the publisher, Scholastic Books, to produce four related series that include more than 90 titles. Each book seeks to personalize important events in American history through the diary of a fictionalized main character. According to the publisher,…

In this article, the author reflects on Frederick Douglass's different interpretations of the Constitution. One explanation of the shift in Douglass's thinking on the Constitution had to do with his growing intellectual independence. Douglass had the intellectual space to reflect on the fact that there was more than one way to think about…