“Petitions!,” a freshman exclaimed in response to my question about the methods that enslaved people of African descent adopted in their demands for freedom in Revolutionary New England. One petition was authored by Peter Bestes and three other enslaved men. On April 20, 1773, they called on the Massachusetts General Court to extend “civil and religious liberty” to enslaved Black people. Just as white colonists sought “to free themselves from slavery” to Parliamentary regulation, so the petitioners were “men” and “have a natural right to” freedom as much as whites. This and other records on slavery and freedom in the revolutionary and early national eras come from Woody Holton’s Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era, a wonderful primary-source reader I assigned to my U.S. I survey students in spring 2025.[1]

Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger, watercolor of American soldiers during the Yorktown campaign, Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University (https://library.brown.edu/info/collections/askb/manuscripts/). De Verger was a French officer who fought under the Comte de Rochambeau. In “Journal des faits les plus importants, arrivés aux troupes françaises aux ordres de Mr. le Comte de Rochambeau, ca. 1781–(1784),” de Verger made several watercolor drawings, including this one. It features a Black soldier who likely belonged to the First Rhode Island Regiment. Both Rhode Island and Massachusetts “formed military units that consisted entirely or mostly of African Americans,” though they were commanded by white officers (Holton, Black Americans, 11-12).

I had several goals in mind. First, I wanted my freshmen to think deeply about primary sources as a tool to discover new ideas, perspectives, and peoples in the study of U.S. history. Doing so would help them understand the hard work and patience that interpretation of text requires. Second, I wanted them to encounter, if not fully accept, a dimension of the American Revolution that didn’t privilege the Stamp Act or Lexington and Concord or General George Washington. Instead, I wanted them to know about slavery in “the North” or the lives of David George and Boston King or Jefferson’s racist Notes on the State of Virginia. Very few students know anything about this history and even less how it conditioned the emergence of a new republic.

Further, I wanted my students to hold, read, and mark up an actual book. I am not critical of OERs, and I regularly assign American Yawp, especially to students in my online surveys. However, as I’ve learned from my students, very few have read a book from cover to cover, discussed it, taken notes on it, and completed a writing assignment about it. In spring 2025, I required my freshmen to obtain a hard copy of Holton’s reader and bring it to every discussion day. (For context, my class size was 24 students with no TA.)

I spread out discussion over four 75-minute class periods. I divided them into four groups, assigned two to three documents to each, and gave them a list of questions to guide the small group discussions. Each group had 30 minutes to discuss ideas and arrive at some sort of consensus. In the remaining 45 minutes, I reconvened class so that the groups could share their points with all of us. As this unfolded, I recorded their thoughts in a Word document that everyone could see. This wasn’t easy. I had to listen, think, write, and talk simultaneously. It was worth the effort, though, because I was able to model good writing for a freshmen audience, validate the ideas shared by those who chose to speak up, and spark additional questions and responses from the other groups.[2]

In my view, an activity like this is a far more effective tactic to engage students and encourage critical inquiry than a mere lecture. (I do lecture, by the way, probably too much.) One student noted in my evaluations, “The in class discussions on the assignments allowed me to gauge my own understanding of the material with others in my class, as well as allowed me to understand what the professor expected us to understand.”

To address the elephant in the room, I also assigned a physical book to suppress AI. I have always assigned primary-source readers, monographs, and other physical sources, but more than ever I am seeking ways to ensure an ethical and rigorous college classroom environment. Simply put, my students must read, think, and write with the Human Intelligence that they already have and must develop to earn a college degree. Plus, ours is a reading- and writing-intensive field, and eighteen-year-old freshmen should understand and grapple with field standards.

To assess my students’ writing ability, then, the four discussion days culminated in a fifth class meeting in which they completed a two-page handwritten essay. I asked them to select seven primary sources from Holton’s volume to trace the lives of enslaved people before, during, and after American independence. They were allowed to use the book and their notes as they wrote.

Painting of Rose Fortune, c. 1850. Fortune was born in Philadelphia in the 1770s. During the Revolution, her parents supported the British Army and she and her family were among the Black Loyalists who went to Nova Scotia in 1783. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RoseFortuneNovaScotiaArchievesandRecordsManagement.jpg.

I learned a lot from these essays. While my freshmen complained (politely) about reading 140 pages of history, they proved themselves capable of reading and deciphering complex sources about race, slavery, war, freedom, and post-emancipation life. Just about everyone got the contradiction between whites’ demand for “liberty” and Blacks’ own struggle to secure it, and all of them took seriously the ways in which Black people sought freedom during and after the War for Independence. Many, for example, wrote about Black soldiers’ wartime experiences and Black veterans’ pension applications. I do wish more had written about the Black Loyalists who fled the U.S. and found freedom elsewhere. Traditional spatial boundaries were difficult to transcend for many of them. Their writing focused on the U.S. at the exclusion of, say, Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. Even a few wrote “nothing much changed” after 1783 because slavery continued to exist (and grow) in the early national and antebellum eras.

Overall, the value of primary-source learning in college-level freshmen history courses cannot be overstated. Few freshmen have engaged rigorously with original documents before stepping into my class, and few have been made to reflect on the complex history of freedom, slavery, and agency in the early U.S. Holton’s book and other entries in the Bedford Series open up a world of possibilities to freshmen, many of whom are quite eager to learn something different.[3] A discussion format that precedes formal writing is a great way to accomplish this. Group discussion, in particular, encourages both breadth and depth about historical topics, raises numerous questions that force students to reconsider existing ideas, and provides them with a newfound confidence that may not be readily apparent in a writing assignment.

Going forward, I may assign primary-source readers with more structure in mind. Perhaps I could devote a full class period to post-emancipation societies beyond the U.S, or perhaps I could recommend explicit ideas to guide their reading. Striking a balance between structure and free-flowing discussion is tricky, and I don’t want them to think along the lines of what “Dr. Peach wants.” There are no easy answers here. Still, my experience with teaching Holton’s reader certainly challenged students’ existing ideas and assumptions about the revolutionary era and the early republic.

Endnotes

[1] Woody Holton, Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2009). See Document 6, Petition from Felix, 1/6/1773, pp. 42–43; Document 8, Letter from Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joe, 4/20/1773, pp. 46–47 (quotes); Document 20, Petition from Nero Brewster et al., 11/12/1779, pp. 72–74; and Petition from John Cuffee et al., 2/10/1780, pp. 75–76.

[2] My approach was in part inspired by Allan Collins, Ann Holum, and John Seely Brown, “Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible,” American Educator 15 (Winter 1991), 1–18.

[3] In spring 2024, I first tried this discussion-oriented approach to primary-source learning by assigning Ernesto Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2008). I did not require the students to read the entire book; instead, I assigned about fifteen documents out of fifty-three total and merely encouraged them to read the remaining documents.