61 pages • 2 hours read
Frederick DouglassA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.
Short Answer
In the years before the Civil War, how might the labor of enslaved people have been different depending on geographical location? What kind of labor do you think enslaved people did in Maryland, in particular?
Teaching Suggestion: Students may come to this autobiographical narrative with narrow notions of pre-war life set in the South, as images of plantations and labor in the cotton fields tend to be prevalent in film and books. Readers may not have considered life in other parts of the antebellum South and might be surprised to learn more about the Chesapeake area, with its maritime culture, oyster fishing, and urban trade. It also might be beneficial to guide student discussion regarding how enslaved labor was exploited to build its economy on all levels (not just in agriculture), as this narrative shows.
By Frederick Douglass