Unit Introduction:

The North and South

Unit Highlights

In this unit, students will analyze primary and secondary sources to explain the divergent paths of the American people in the Northeast and South from 1800 to the mid-1800s and the challenges they faced. Students will be able to:

  • Explain the causes and effects of industrialization in the North

  • Explain the causes for the rise of immigration in the North and how it changed America’s demographics.

  • Describe the lives of free black Americans and classify how they work to advance their rights and communities

  • Classify the key figures in the women’s suffrage movement.

  • Describe themes in American art and literature.

  • Explain the significance of agriculture in the South

  • Explain the origins and development of slavery and describe its effect on black Americans

  • Classify strategies that tried to overturn

  • Describe white Southern Society and explain how they worked to preserve slavery.

  • Compare and contrast free blacks in the North and South.

Unit Vocabulary

  • Agrarian

  • Cotton gin

  • Denmark Vesey

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  • Frederick Douglass

  • Great Irish Famine

  • Henry David Thoreau

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  • Herman Melville

  • Immigration

  • Individualism

  • Industrialization

  • King Cotton

  • Louisa May Alcott

  • Lucretia Mott

  • Margaret Fuller

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne

  • Nat Turner

  • Plantation

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Richard Allen

  • Sectionalism

  • Seneca Falls Convention

  • Slavery

  • Sojourner Truth

  • Susan B. Anthony

  • Transcendentalism

  • Urbanization

Activity 1: The North and South Pre-Test

Using your prior knowledge, brainstorm, list, and/or draw what you know about the North and South in a thinking map. Complete this assignment on the Thinking Maps Learning Community or on paper. You may include:

  • Information you know or kind of know about the North and South.

  • Guesses about the North and South.

  • Questions you have about the North and South.

  • Information you would like to know about the North and South.

  • What comes to mind when you think of the North and South.