Grade 5 Fall — Early US History through the American Revolution (Pre-Contact through 1783): Many Nations, Many Voices, Many Revolutions

Trace the formation of the racial caste system in colonial America from 1676 Bacon's Rebellion to 1705 Virginia Slave Codes — how race became a legal and social category that did not exist in 1619

Trace the SPECIFIC LEGAL MECHANISM by which colonial Virginia (and by extension other colonies) constructed a hereditary, race-based caste system: (a) 1640 John Punch case — first colonial court ruling treating an African as enslaved for life while two white indentured runaways received finite-year sentences; (b) 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties — first colonial law legalizing slavery; (c) 1662 Virginia partus sequitur ventrem — slave-status follows the mother (making slavery hereditary and disconnecting it from religious conversion); (d) 1664 Maryland anti-miscegenation law — first law against interracial marriage; (e) 1676 Bacon's Rebellion — a multi-racial uprising of indentured white servants, enslaved Africans, and free Black men against the Virginia colonial government; the planter elite's response was to legally separate the categories 'white' and 'Black' to prevent future cross-racial coalition; (f) 1691 Virginia law banning manumission without removal from colony; (g) 1705 Virginia Slave Codes — comprehensive consolidation of chattel slavery as race-based and hereditary, establishing legal categories of 'white' and 'Black/Negro' as legally distinct. Apply Teaching Hard History K-5 Key Concepts KC2 (racist belief in white superiority) and KC7 (slavery shaped racial beliefs that still affect us). CRITICAL: 'race' as we know it today did NOT exist in 1619 — it was constructed by these specific laws over decades. CRITICAL: this is trauma-informed MG-15 protocol applied.

Exercise pool (2)