| Summary |
Civil Rights in the USA has been developed especially for senior secondary students of History and is part of the Nelson Modern History series. Each book in the series is based on the understanding that History is an interpretive study of the past by which you also come to better appreciate the making of the modern world. In many of the southern states of the United States of America, buses were divided so that white passengers sat at the front and black passengers sat at the back. When the white sections were full, black passengers were expected to give up their seats for white passengers. Black passengers paid at the front of the bus, but had to enter at the back, no matter what the weather. White bus drivers could, without explanation, eject black passengers from buses. In Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a standing white man. Parks was arrested at the next stop for disobeying the municipal rule of compulsory segregation on buses. Parks' individual act triggered one of the most successful campaigns of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Developing understandings of the past and present in senior History extends on the skills you learnt in earlier years. As senior students you will use historical skills, including research, evaluation, synthesis, analysis and communication, and the historical concepts, such as evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, significance, empathy, perspectives and contestability, to understand and interpret societies from the past. The activities and tasks in Civil Rights in the USA have been written to ensure that you develop the skills and attributes you need in senior History subjects. |
