Welcome to Division 3 Humanities

This trimester, American Historiography focused on the second half of the 20th century. We began by reading James Baldwin’s book of essays, The Fire Next Time, and Margo Jefferson’s memoir Negroland. We used these texts to explore questions about privilege, innocence, gender, and double-consciousness. We then moved into the civil rights movement and examined several underrepresented or commonly misunderstood facets of the era. Next, we read Assata Shakur’s memoir Assata as a way of understanding the black power movement. To further explore the context of the book, students chose topics to research and created a curriculum on black radicalism in the 1970s. Finally, students read Cornelius Eady’s poetry collection, Brutal Imagination, and watched Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to examine facets of the Black American experience in the 1980s and 90s, much of which reverberates today. As a final project, students composed two poems in response to these works and others.