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Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Bret Eynon <BEynon@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Impeachment Teaching?
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Hi Friends,
I've been following this list with interest and admiration for the work that
you've all been doing. Running a couple of other lists of my own, I've not
been able to contribute much here. But I did want to comment on the
discussion of impeachment teaching resources.
Following up on Mel's initial posting, I went and looked at the HarpWeek site.
I was both impressed and disappointed. The images and editorials of Harper's
Weekly are tremendous resources. And in this regard I would highly recommend
the site as source and a way of engaging students. I'm hoping that the
HarpWeek folks continue to develop such sites. Harper's Weekly is tremendous
primary source, both sophisticated and accessible.
Unfortunately, I found the site's historical background essays, written by
HarpWeek staff, to be superficial and narrow (a bad combination). In
particular, there is virtually no contextual information provided about
Reconstruction. To my mind, one can't fully understand the meaning of the
Johnson trial without understanding its roots in the battle over racial
equality and the direction of Reconstruction.
This is perhaps my personal interpretation. But if you feel similarly and
wanted to use this site to study the Johnson impeachment, I would strongly
recommend that you draw on other sources for this contextual imformation. Two
good places to start are Eric Foner's "America's Reconstruction," the leading
scholarly synthesis on this period, and ASHP's own "Freedom's Unfinished
Revolution: An Inquiry Into the Civil War and Reconstruction," (New Press,
NY, 1996) a high school text with an abundance of primary documents and
images.
Hope you are all well,
Bret Eynon
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