Welcome and Site Orientation

Dear Student:

Welcome to our website! Here, we have taken documents from our collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society and matched them with documents from the Library of Congress. Each document in the pair helps to shed light on its corresponding mate.

To further help, we have provided five types of document-based questions for you to explore as you delve into these primary sources, including one which encourages you to connect the two documents in each pair. The 5-CON questions bring you to an understanding of why, for whom, and under what circumstances each was created.

The pairs of documents are arranged chronologically in five different sections. Overarching framing questions ask you to demonstrate how the documents in each section provide evidence about a variety of topics.

We have also added to the website some supplementary resources to give you background and context for understanding the documents: material on people, organizations, events and issues mentioned in the documents, links to good websites, and an introductory essay on the theme of ending slavery in this country by historian Chandra Manning, who teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

We would love to hear from you about how the website worked and what we could do to make it even better.

Now off to your investigation of THE CASE FOR ENDING SLAVERY!

The Education Department, Massachusetts Historical Society