Making Freedom: African Americans in U.S. History Curriculum

About the Curriculum

Making Freedom is a digital curriculum developed by Primary Source which provides content spanning over 400 years of African American history, with inspiring and engaging multi-dimensional lessons and teaching strategies in alignment with MA state standards.

This African American digital curriculum is based on Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History (Heinemann, 2004), teacher sourcebooks designed to recount the African American experience in the United States for K-12 students. The digital curriculum project has adapted the books’ content and resources for today’s students at the middle and high school levels, and selected units are appropriate for students at the upper elementary level. 

The curriculum is flexibly designed, allowing you to use a single lesson, a collection of topics or a unit to form a powerful vehicle for bringing the history of African American life to middle and high school classrooms. As the expert in your classroom, you are able to move through each theme as a structured whole to explore the fullness of the events and figures of the timeframe or take one focus in history and explore it across time frames.

5 comprehensive open-access lessons on The Gold Road in West Africa on Making Freedom