Education at
Whitney Plantation

• Describe the development of the transatlantic slave trade and the experiences of enslaved people in the Americas.

• Analyze the causes, interactions, and consequences related to triangular trade, including the forced migration of Africans through the transatlantic trade of enslaved people and experiences of the Middle Passage.

• Analyze the development of the agrarian economy in the South, including Louisiana, and explain how advancements in technology, such as the cotton gin and multiple‐effect evaporator for sugar, contributed to an increase in enslaved labor. 

• Describe the roles and experiences of soldiers, women, enslaved people, and freed people during the Civil War.
• Analyze the role of Louisiana in the Civil War and how the conflict affected Louisiana and its people, including the importance of its ports and the occupation of New Orleans.
• Analyze the purpose, significance, and consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

• Analyze the development and effects of tenant farming and the sharecropping system in the postwar South.
• Explain how federal action affected individual rights and freedoms during the Reconstruction era, including through the Thirteenth Amendment, Freedmen’s Bureau, Civil Rights Bill of 1866, Reconstruction Act of 1867, Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, and analyze the challenges, achievements, and effectiveness of each.

ERA 6: Standard 4B

The student understands the origins and consequences of the trans-Atlantic African slave trade.

• Explain how commercial sugar production spread from the Mediterranean to the Americas and analyze why sugar, tobacco, and other crops grown in the Americas became so important in the world economy.

• Explain the organization of long-distance trade in West and Central Africa and analyze the circumstances under which African governments, elites, merchants, and other groups participated in the sale of slaves to Europeans.

• Explain how European governments and firms organized and financed the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and describe the conditions under which slaves made the “middle passage” from Africa to the Americas.

• Analyze the emergence of social hierarchies based on race and gender in the Iberian, French, and British colonies in the Americas.

• Describe conditions of slave life on plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and British North America and analyze ways in which slaves perpetuated aspects of African culture and resisted plantation servitude.

ERA 4: Standard 2D

The student understands the rapid growth of “the peculiar institution” after 1800 and the varied experiences of African Americans under slavery.

• Analyze the impact of the Haitian Revolution and the ending of the Atlantic slave trade.

• Explain how the cotton gin and the opening of new lands in the South and West led to the increased demand for slaves.

• Describe the plantation system and the roles of their owners, their families, hired white workers, and enslaved African Americans.

• Identify the various ways in which African Americans resisted the conditions of their enslavement and analyze the consequences of violent uprisings.

• Evaluate how enslaved African Americans used religion and family to create a viable culture and ameliorate the effects of slavery.

• Slavery and the slave trade were central to the development and growth of the colonial economies and what is now the United States.
• “Slavery was an institution of power,” designed to create profit for the enslavers and break the will of the enslaved and was a relentless quest for profit abetted by racism.
• Enslaved people resisted the efforts of their enslavers to reduce them to commodities in both revolutionary and everyday ways.
• Slavery shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness, and white supremacy was both a product and legacy of slavery.
• Enslaved and freed people worked to maintain cultural traditions while building new ones that sustain communities and impact the larger world.
• By knowing how to read and interpret the sources that tell the story of American slavery, we gain insight into some of what enslaving and enslaved Americans aspired to, created, thought and desired.