“It was such a deep and rich experience that I’m still processing it…I think the humanities may be the key to teaching history — allowing students to respond to works of art or primary source narratives as a way of getting a grasp on history.”

“I am most excited by the substantial background information on the history of slavery in this country. I had little knowledge and could not help teachers or students undertake learning in a meaningful way. I was uncomfortable with this history, as are many teachers, but the immersion in substance has given me the confidence to incorporate it in the curriculum in a way that will not make African American students feel demeaned or white students feel guilty.”

“I really felt that every minute was extremely well programmed and worthwhile. We were treated like royalty in a way–there was so much respect shown to us as educators.”

“This was a very valuable program. It combined theory with biography, activities with field trips – a good model of what should happen in the classroom.”

“What a fabulous opportunity! The more I learned the more I realized that I needed to learn. I realize now that there is so much new information on this subject that I did not have, nor was I even aware of.”

Curves and Scrolls

Day and many other period artisans featured curves and S-shapes as both decorative and functional elements. These kinds of curvilinear designs can be found in a pattern book called, The Cabinet Maker’s Assistant ( Baltimore: John Murphy, 1840) which is one Day used as a reference. He often uses S-shapes in unique ways as in the supports for this mirror.

Expert Veneer Work

Day used imported mahogany veneers extensively which he applied to less expensive woods like pine and poplar. His veneers were cut unusually thin for the times (sometimes as thin as 1/16th of an inch). They are also distinctive in the way he expertly matched the wood grain as shown here where the two pieces of veneer come together beneath the key holes of each drawer.

Dovetail Joints

The mark of fine cabinetmaking is joinery. In this piece of Day furniture, notice the dovetail joints that are expertly cut, thin, and not concealed or hidden.

Newell Posts & Distinctive Interior Architecture

Day is especially known for his sculptural newel posts and other distinctive interior architecture. Some people have seen a parallel between some of these forms and the stylized abstract forms of African sculpture. Art historians advising the TDEP, however, are reluctant to attribute the aesthetic preferences in Day’s work to an African aesthetic. They argue that much more research on Day’s body of work would need to be done before it could be called “African” or for that matter “European.” What we do know is that it is “American,” which means that it is a mix of diverse cultural and aesthetic influences.

• The North Carolina Museum of History (NCMH) has a collection of approximately 30 pieces of Day furniture contributed to the museum by Winston-Salem Delta Fine Arts and North Carolina members of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. The museum is planning a major traveling exhibit of Day’s work for 2007.
• Tours are periodically offered by the Thomas Day House/ Union Tavern Restoration, Inc. Committee. This group is in the process of restoring The Union Tavern, Thomas Day’s home and workplace.
• There is a Thomas Day sofa on exhibit at Stagville Plantation in Durham, North Carolina.
• Several pieces of Thomas Day furniture can be viewed at the Greensboro Historical Museum and also at the Alamance County Historical Museum.

For more information about tours and other activities in Thomas Day Country, contact either of the following:

Mrs. Marian Thomas
PO Box 1996
Milton, NC 27305

Mrs. Elizabeth McPherson, Vice-President
Caswell County Historical Association
PO Box 386
Yanceyville, NC 28459

Barfield, Rodney. “Thomas Day, Cabinetmaker.” Nineteenth Century , Autumn 1976: 23 32.

Barfield, Rodney. Introduction to Thomas Day, Cabinetmaker: An Exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, NC, 1975. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of History, Department of Cultural Resources, 1975.

Barfield, Rodney. Thomas Day, Cabinetmaker . Monograph with photographs of furniture from opening Exhibit of Day Furniture at the North Carolina Museum of History, 1974.

Batory, Dana C. Vintage Woodworking Machinery. Mendham, NJ : Astragal Press, 1995.

Bennett, Jr., Lerone. Before the Mayflower, A History of Black America. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Berlin, Ira, Barbara J. Fields, Steven Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie Rowland, eds., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War. New York: The New Press, 1992

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Bishir, Catherine W. “Black Builders in Antebellum North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review , LXI (October 1984): 423-61.

Bishop, Robert. How to Know American Antique Furniture. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1973.

Bivins, John, Jr. The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina 1700-1820. Winston-Salem: The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1988.

Blassingame, John. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1979.

Blassingame, John. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

Carter, Janie Leigh. John Day: A Founder of the Republic of Liberia and The Southern Baptist Liberian Missionary Movement in the 19th Century , Masters Thesis, Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University, May 1998.

Clayton, Thomas H. Close to the Land: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1820 1870. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Comstock, Helen. American Furniture: Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Century Styles. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

Conway, Cecelia. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Crowe, Jeffrey, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley. A History of African Americans in North Carolina , Revised edition. Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, Department of Cultural Resources, 2002.

Dennis, Denise. Black History for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1995.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The Classic Slave Narratives. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: New American Library, 1987.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage Books, The Library of America, 1990.

Durham, Michael S. “I Am Going to Be Thomas Day.” American Legacy (Winter 1998): 48-53.

Fleischner, Jennifer. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.

Finkenbine, Roy. Sources of the African-American Past: Primary Sources in American History. New York: Longman, 1997.

Franklin, John Hope. The Free Negro in North Carolina , 1790 – 1860 : New York, W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1971.

Franklin, John Hope. Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988 , Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred E. Moss. From Slavery to Freedom. Seventh edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Free Negro Family. Nashville, TN: Fisk University Press, 1932.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House, 1974.

Green, Michael. “Thomas Day, African American Craftsman.” I Wish I had a Bedroom to Call My Own. Somers, NY: Tuesday’s Child Publishing Ltd., 1995. 96

Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1976.

Harding, Vincent. There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981.

Heinegg, Paul. Free African-Americans of North Carolina and Virginia , Baltimore: Clearview Publishing Company  This resource is now online atFree African Americans.

Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in American History: From Colonial Times through the 19th Century. Four volumes. New York: Carlson Press, 1993.

Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harold. The African American Odyssey. Vol. 1. New York: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

Holland, Juanita M. “To Be Free, Gifted, and Black” in The International Review of African American Art: 1 9th Century African American Craft Arts of the South, Vol.12. Nos. 1. pgs. 4-25. Dr. Holland was guest editor for Vol. 12. Nos. 1 – 3 all of which focused on 19th-century African-American artists and artisans and provide a context for examining Thomas Day. Day’s work is addressed in No. 3, pg. 16.

Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks , 1700-1806. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean F. Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Jacobs, Sylvia M., ed. Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Plume, 1990.

Johnson, Michael P. and James L. Roark. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.

Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

Kay, Marvin and Lorin Cary. Slav ery in North Carolina, 1748-1775. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Keckly, Elizabeth. Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years as Slave, and Four Years in the White House. Orig. publ. 1868. Introd. James Olney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Landsmark, Theodore C. “Comments on African American Contributions to American Material Life.” Winterthur Portfolio 33 (Winter 1998) Winterthur: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. 261-282.

Lebsock, Suzanne. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town , New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984.

Lyons, Mary E. Master of Mahogany: Tom Day, Free Black Cabinetmaker. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.

Marshall, Patricia Phillips. “The Legendary Thomas Day: Debunking the Popular Mythology of an African American Craftsman.” North Carolina Historical Review (January 2001). 32-66.

McGraw, Marie Tyler, ed. “‘The Prize I Mean is the Prize of Liberty’: A Loudon County Family in Liberia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. 97 No. 3 (July 1989). 356-374

Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1984.

Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy. New York: De Capo Press, 1970.

Palmer, Colin A. Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1994.

Paquette, Michael. “An Inquiry Into Business and Labor Practices in an Antebellum Cabinetshop.” Journal of North Carolina Association of Historians. Vol. 6. (Fall 2002) 1 15

Parker, Freddie L. Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1791-1840. New York: Garland Press, 1994.

Powell, William S. When the Past Refused to Die: A History of Caswell County, North Carolina, 1777-1977. Durham: Moore Publishing Company, 1977.

Prown, Jonathan. “A Cultural Analysis of Furniture-making in Petersburg, Virginia, 1760-1820.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Vol. XVIII, No. 1, May 1992. 1 173.

Prown, Jonathan. “The Furniture of Thomas Day: A Reevaluation” Winterthur Portfolio. 33 No. 4 (Winter 1998). Winterthur: The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. 215-229.

Prown, Jonathan and Randall L. Hurst. Southern Furniture. Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997.

Rogers, Patricia Dane. “Carved in History -Thomas Day: A Success in an Unlikely Time and Place,” in The Washington Post , Feb. 13, 1997, pp. 10 – 21.

Schweninger, Loren. Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Sneed, Laurel and Christine Westfall. Uncovering the Hidden History of Thomas Day: Findings and Methodology. Durham, NC: Thomas Day Education Project, 1995.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Tyler-McGraw, Marie, ed. “The Prize I Mean is the Prize of Liberty: A Loudoun County Family in Liberia” in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97/3 (1989): 355-374.

Underhill, Roy. The Woodwright’s Workbook: Further Explorations in Traditional Woodcraft. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1993.

Vlach, John Michael. By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991.

Walker, David. Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Edited by Peter P. Hinks. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Wood, Peter H. “Whetting, Setting, and Laying Timbers: Black Builders of the Early South.” Southern Exposure Magazine , Vol. VIII. No. 1. (Spring 1990). 3-8.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

Wood, Peter H. “‘It Was a Negro Taught Them’: A New Look at African Labor in Early South Carolina.” Journal of Asian and African Studies IX, (October 1974): 160-79.

Wood, Peter H. Strange New Land: African Americans 1617-1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs, A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

Each year the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) identifies the best of the best in children’s books, recordings, videos, and computer software. “Exploring the World of Thomas Day” was chosen as one of the most notable entries in the computer software category.

Technology & Learning Magazine Award of Excellence, Dec 2003

Exploring the World of Thomas Day focuses on the life and work of a free African American furniture maker living in the South shortly before the U.S. Civil War. This two-CD package features video-based enactments of Thomas Day’s life and puzzle-like missions that challenge students to explore an interactive map with buildings containing clues in the form of primary documents, newspaper articles, ads, and interviews. Our judges were enthusiastic about the historical content, the easy-to-use interface, and the motivating way in which the program models the historical research process.

Children Software Review All-Star Award, May 2003

This is a very well made, easy-to-use ‘interactive documentary’ whose compelling format quickly draws kids into the process of learning history. Teacher support materials are included and comprehensive.

Interactive Multimedia Award of Excellence, May 2004

We liked it! Good use of media…this was truly interactive, not pseudo-interactive…

If Thomas Day offers one window into the complex world of antebellum race relations, his Presbyterian minister in Milton, the Rev. Nehemiah Henry Harding, provides another. Slavery was the most controversial issue of the day and everyone had strong opinions. Advocates could be found for armed revolt, peaceful petitioning, immediate freedom, gradual emancipation, African colonization, or continued enslavement. As controversy swirled, individuals shifted their stance on the matter. This is particularly clear in the zigzags of Milton’s Harding, a strong-willed cleric who arrived in town in 1835, the same year Thomas Day attended the black convention in Philadelphia.

Born in Brunswick, Maine, in 1794, Harding went to sea at an early age and became captain of a vessel plying the waters off the coast of North Carolina. Early in the 1820s, a time of widespread religious awakening, he experienced a shipboard conversion during a storm and changed careers. He worked briefly in Raleigh and attended the University of North Carolina for two years, intent on entering the ministry. Admitted to Princeton Theological Seminary in 1826, he was ordained and became pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1830. Harding served there five years before moving to Milton where he became the pastor of the Milton Presbyterian Church and also founded the Yanceyville Presbyterian Church. He lived in Milton until his death in 1849.

Harding never lost touch with his friends and family in Maine. During trips back to Brunswick, the minister addressed topics including slavery. Long before Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to Brunswick in 1850 and penned her highly influential best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the town was engaged in discussing slavery. Local Bowdoin College spawned vigorous debate on abolition. When Harding returned in 1833 after living in a slave state for more than a decade, “he delivered a [pro] colonization lecture to the students.” As a local anti-slavery advocate recounted five years later, the minister seemed “dark in mind . . . and hard in heart.” But in Maine he “came in contact with abolitionists, and . . . returned to the South with arrows of truth rankling in his bosom.”

The commentator, who published his musings in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1838, reported that Harding had undergone a swift change of heart in North Carolina. Although “surrounded with adverse influences” and at odds with the “the prevailing current of popular feeling,” he nevertheless announced his ..opposition to slavery.” The commentator knew this because in July of 1834, Harding had sent a letter to the Rev. George Adams at Brunswick’s First Parish Congrega- tional Church, “stating the change that had taken place in his mind on the subject of slavery.”The commentator shared an excerpt from this letter with readers of The Liberator:

You remember that while I was with you last summer, I was much opposed to the anti-slavery society, and contended that the colonization scheme was … the only remedy for the evils of slavery, and that I made a … talk before the students; it was [a] poor talk, for it was a miserable theme … I feel it a duty I owe to myself and the friends I have with you, to say that my views and feelings which were then wavering, have, after mature deliberation and much prayer, been entirely changed: and that I am now a strong anti- slavery man. Yes, after mature reflection, I am the sworn enemy of slavery in all its forms and with all its evils. Henceforth it is a part of my religion to oppose slavery. I am greatly surprised that I should in any form have been the apologist of a system so full of deadly poison to all holiness and benevolence, as slavery—the concocted essence of fraud, selfishness and cold hearted tyranny, and the fruitful parent of unnumbered evils to the oppressor and the oppressed, the one thousandth part of which has never been brought to the light.^[1]

But the story didn’t end there. The last sentence of this quote beginning with “I am greatly surprised …” was extracted from The Liberator and republished later by Theodore Dwight Weld in the American Anti- Slavery Society publication, American Slavery As it Is: The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. The book’s influence on anti-slavery sentiment in the country was only surpassed by Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

On a return visit to Brunswick in 1838, Harding shifted his stance on the issue yet again. The local observer was astonished to hear him make “gratuitous and invidious remarks” about the increasing militancy of abolitionists. (“Mr. Harding was asked while here this time, what he thought of the abolition efforts now, and he replied it was a ‘nefarious business. That we had better take care of our own poor.’”) From the pulpit, the visitor from Milton bemoaned the fact that “now the church itself has become the great agitator.”

Asked to read an announcement for a meeting addressing “the duty of Christians . . . towards the colored people,” he refused and preached a sermon warning Brunswick’s citizens to beware of excessive zeal regarding their “duty to the colored people.” Harding’s “palpable inconsistency” stung the irate commentator who informed his readers: “We see the withering, mildew influence of slavery on the southern ministry and church. It has been doubtless thro’ the influence of the clergy and the church that Mr. H. has been tempted to close his ear and steel his heart against the cry of the bleeding captive, and again to become the ‘apologist of a system full of deadly poison to all holiness and benevolence.’”

What are we to make of this scathing commentary? Does it reflect the view of a sheltered New Englander with little appreciation of the complexities Harding faced in keeping his North Carolina congregation together? And, what are we to make of the ship captain-turned-preacher? A slaveholder himself, Harding appears to be actively wrestling with this thorny issue, shifting his position as his circumstances and perceptions change. But his return to an apologist stance also suggests that he was trying to distance himself from his earlier passionate anti- slavery statements that were, apparently without his consent, appropriated and widely published by radical abolitionists.

We may never know how Harding truly felt, but perhaps his views changed again during the last decade of his life through interaction with his most prominent free black parishioner. After all, he and Thomas Day were each learning from experience that racial enslavement in the United States might outlast them both, and that they needed to be guarded in their stated public opinions if they were to endure and prosper in North Carolina.

1. ^[1] The Liberator, “A Recreant Minister,” June 29, 1838. Accessible Archives, Inc. is available at www.accessible.com ↩

Vended by New Hope Publishing LLC

Exploring the World of Thomas Day (EWTD), is an award-winning, interactive multimedia on CD-ROM for grades 4 and up. Produced with major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and after five years of Research & Development with scholars, teachers, and students, this teaching-tool features important themes of the 19th century African-American experience while it involves the student in the detective work that real historians engage in when they seek, find and interpret primary source documents.

CD1 (Program Application)

CD 2 (Educational Companion)

Program Application and Educational Companion

Exploring the World of Thomas Day is a new, exciting interactive multimedia CD-ROM-based educational experience that’s easy to install on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. (Windows 98 to XP and Mac OS 8.6 – X) It contains the Program Application (CD 1) and a comprehensive Educational Companion (CD 2).

Fun & Informative

This highly involving application enables students to learn firsthand the most fundamental–and fun–part of being a historian: the detective work involved in tracking down historical evidence and using it to solve questions about the past!

Aligned to the National History Standards for 19th-century African-American historical content and to the “historical thinking” standards, this product has been called “an interactive documentary”, “a simulation of doing historical research,” and a “really cool game.” In fact, all of these terms apply! Students search 40+ primary and secondary sources for clues that hold the key to understanding the world of a free black furniture maker named Thomas Day, who lived in the South in the dramatic decades before the Civil War. Along the way students encounter – in short video clips – 19th century youngsters who know Day. They challenge students with puzzle-like missions to explore Day’s Family & Community; his Shop & Marketplace; and the Laws & Society with which he lived.

Exploring the World of Thomas Day has been designed for maximum ease of use. Teachers report they can use it effectively with minimum preparation time. Students quickly figure out the “rules of the game” and navigate the application easily and quickly become absorbed. In fact, you may find, as other teachers have, that the bell will ring and they won’t want to leave!

Finding Evidence in Documents in “Searchboro”

Searchboro: Where students find primary and secondary sources about the past

Students search for historical evidence in Searchboro, a virtual research landscape of the types of places historians do research. They find primary sources on shelves, in file drawers, on microfiche and in old trunks in locations like “the Courthouse”, “the University” ,”the Archives,” and even in the attic of “the Descendant’s Home ” and a “Furniture Museum.” They also come across secondary sources like video clips of video interviews with historians and newspaper articles and ads.

Searchboro: Where students find primary and secondary sources about the past

Mini-Video “Documentaries” and “Archibald’s Dilemma”

Archibald in Jail

As students search for historical knowledge and gain research and critical thinking know-how, they meet several teens who know Thomas Day. The first one they meet is an Apprentice to Day named Archibald Clark, who urgently needs their help. Solving Archibald’s dilemma is the motivational device or ” game goal” that keeps students focused on accomplishing missions and challenges that require them to think critically and apply knowledge gleaned from the historical evidence they have uncovered in Searchboro.

Educational Companion CD 2

Developed with teacher input, The Educational Companion CD includes a Teacher’s Guide with a Tour and tips for use with various computer set-ups. It also provides a “Teacher Resources folder” that contains: a document database with full text of all 40+ documents used in the application; worksheets for different student skill levels; assessment guidelines; answer keys; national standards; lecture notes; a detailed time line; a glossary; map; and suggested readings and websites.

The expansion of the popular five-day Crafting Freedom workshop – which has to date been offered seven times to over 400 teachers nationwide – to a fourteen day seminar will allow needed time for: reflection and discussion; study of new scholarship on the lives of other artisans, entrepreneurs and artists; viewing and exploring the instructional uses of recently produced instructional films, media and on-line resources on slavery and freedom and interacting with experienced teacher mentors highly experienced in teaching this material.

Thomas Day and Elizabeth Keckly provide rich and rare case histories of the black artisan experience in the 19th century. Although the level of success Day and Keckly achieved was exceptional, many of their life experiences were typical for the untold thousands of free and enslaved black artisans, entrepreneurs, and artists who, despite the racially based societal constraints placed on all people of color, used their unique talents and skills to “craft freedom” for themselves and others.

Thomas Day was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia in 1801 and moved as a young man to the town of Milton in Caswell County, North Carolina. Milton was a booming tobacco market center and there Day became one of the most prominent furniture makers in the antebellum South. By 1850 his shop in the former Union Tavern was the largest furniture-making establishment in the state. His striking furniture designs have survived for over 150 years and today are considered outstanding examples of 19th-century American vernacular furniture.

Elizabeth Keckly also was born in Dinwiddie County sixteen years after Thomas Day. However, she was born into slavery. As she grew into adulthood, she honed her skills in the needle arts to become a highly accomplished dressmaker and fashion designer. After thirty years of slavery, she was able to purchase her own and her only child’s freedom. Later Keckly moved to Washington, D.C., and became the sole proprietor of an exclusive dressmaking shop and the fashion designer and confidante of first lady Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1868, she wrote a detailed memoir, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.

Recent research on other black artisans, entrepreneurs, and artists of the 19th century also will be a part of the Institute and will help illuminate three inter-related and overlapping institute themes: “crafting freedom through black business enterprise;” “the politics of crafting freedom;” and “crafting freedom through creative expression.”

According to workshop director, Laurel Sneed, “The Crafting Freedom Institute is critically important because the teaching of African-American history at the K-12 levels—while mandated by curriculum standards in all states—is still too often limited to superficial accounts of plantation slavery, acknowledgement of the Civil Rights Movement, and the listing of a few exemplary blacks during Black History Month. There has been a great deal of scholarly research in recent years on slavery and freedom, yet there are still significant gaps in knowledge and understanding of this history among K-12 teachers. The Institute will address many of these gaps.

The scholarship of the institute aims to add substantial depth to participants’ understanding of what many scholars see as the central paradox of American history—how the institution of race-based slavery co-existed with the expansion of political rights and economic opportunities for most Americans in the 19th century. This paradox began in colonial America, but it was never so visible as in the antebellum period when Keckly, Day, and many other black artisans, entrepreneurs, and artists were intently and independently “crafting freedom” for themselves, their loved ones, and, in a larger sense, for the black community as a whole.