M-18 "War for the Union and for Freedom!": Recruitment of Civil War Volunteer Regiments
This lesson examines the recruitment of volunteer regiments in Kansas at the beginning of the Civil War. Students learn about the nation's need to raise a volunteer army. They compare and contrast soldiers' motivations for joining a volunteer regiment using primary sources and identify how and why a soldier's race factored into the decision to enlist.
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Kansas History Standards:
- Benchmark 2, Indicator 6: The student describes important events in Kansas during the Civil War (e.g., Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence, the Battle of Mine Creek, recruitment of volunteer regiments).
- Benchmark 7, Indicator 2: The student examines different types of primary sources in Kansas history and analyzes them in terms of credibility, purpose, and point of view (e.g., census records, diaries, photographs, letters, government documents).
Reading Standards:
- Benchmark 3, Indicator 1: The student determines meaning of words or phrases using context clues (e.g., definitions, restatements, examples, descriptions, comparison-contrast, clue words) from sentences or paragraphs.
- Benchmark 4, Indicator 5: The student uses information from the text to make inferences and draw conclusions.
Kansas College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core ELA):
- RH.6-8.4: The student determines the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies.
- RI.7.1: The student cites several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
