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The current economic climate provides high school social studies teachers with challenges and opportunities. I split my classroom teaching time between economics and history. I often find myself using economics to teach history, and vice versa. Teaching cultural diversity using these content areas is also a rewarding experience. An extended research project my students and I undertook has yielded a fascinating way to study race and recession within a historical context.
In 2005-2006, while researching the history of Emancipation Day in Ohio, my students and I focused on the towns that celebrated this unique holiday. Emancipation Day in the upper Midwest was celebrated on September 22. This was the date President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The celebration would include music, speeches, and sports. In 1 89 1 Richard Davis described Emancipation Day in Rendville: "Last Tuesday, September 22, we celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation. There was no work at either of our mines that day and a nice day we had, everything passed off smoothly. It seemed all were interested, both white and colored."1
My students' research can be seen at: http://www. washingtonch.k12.oh.us/Senior_High/Emancipation_Day/ EmancipationDay.htm
Rendville is one of only two towns in Ohio that follows this tradition. By reading the Civil War Pension files on the town's African American veterans who fought in the Union army (U.S. Colored Troops or USCT), we gained a glimpse into their lives as coal miners. I've created a lesson that can be used to teach issues of industrialization, cultural diversity, and economics. By examining the origins and operations of the coal mines that primarily employed African Americans in the late nineteenth century, students are exposed to economic and labor issues related to industrialization, as well as the...