For anyone looking for an educational field trip or just for a personally enriching day trip, St. Louis’s Old Courthouse could be interesting. Not only is this the place where Dred Scott first sued for his freedom, it is also the site of a women’s suffrage case as well. Two of the court rooms have been restored to look much as they did in the 1870s and there is a museum dedicated St. Louis history.

Landmark Cases has an easy to follow diagram of the steps which the Dred Scott case took to reach the Supreme Court. Activities to help explain the case are included.

In this article, an African American historian of mental illness argues that the recent rhetoric which describes Barak Obama’s followers as being caught up in Obama-mania is connected to racist ideas from the civil war era that slaves were more inclined to mental insanity than whites. The author links this idea to the notion that blacks were not seen as able to make moral judgments, because they were morally insane, and states that this belief was reflected in the Dred Scott finding. He also discusses how Negro-Mania, which was a medical term invented to describe a white who is obsessed with the slavery question and was used to caste doubts on the sanity of abolitionists, is linked to the current phrase Obama-Mania.

Here is a link to the web site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2932.html.

You have to see the incredible work done by Dean Eastman and other teachers and students from Beverly High School in Massachusetts on the www.primaryresearch.org website. In particular, check out the section entitled, “African-Americans in Antebellum Boston,” (www.primaryresearch.org/bh). They have pulled together an amazing amount of primary resource material, including page images and tables relating to the Boston Vigilance Committee records which was the area’s principal Underground Railroad network. See especially the account books of Treasurer Francis Jackson –amazing! All of this material is filed under Records of Voluntary Associations. There’s also lots more including GIS maps, census records, full-text documents, legislative reports and all kinds of tools for researching the black community in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, especially around Boston. Highly recommended!