Lesson Three Questions
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Question One	To what degree did the political and economic changes that occurred as a result of the Civil War positively affect the lives of African Americans?
Question Two	How were the roles of African American men significantly different (if at all) from those of African American women in the period before and after the Civil War?
Question Three	How widespread was educational opportunity in the period before and after the Civil War?
Question Four	To what extent were the individual lives of the narrators affected by the legislative turmoil which was swirling around Washington DC during the era of Reconstruction?
Question Five	To what extent do the narrators describe actual physical abuse of slaves in the pre-Civil War period?
Question Six	What evidence (if any) are you able to find that African Americans, either as slaves in the period before the Civil War or as freedmen in the later half of the 19th century, rebelled against the prevailing system?
Question Seven	In her interview for the Federal Writer's Project, Charity Anderson responds to a question about her life during slavery by exclaiming, "My! dem was good ol' days". To what extent would the experiences recounted in this collection confirm Charity Anderson's comment?

Tasks to Consider

1. Write a short story which captures the adventures of a fictionalized young African American boy or girl who was born in the 1850s.

2. Illustrate one of the selected themes in the Index by locating appropriate visuals on the web or in your library and copying them and importing them into a multimedia presentation program such as Hyperstudio or Power Point.