The Underground Railroad

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What do you know about the American slavery system and its impact on American history and culture?

Teaching Suggestion: Present this question as a class discussion, setting up the story and themes presented in The Underground Railroad.

• The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones details how extensively the slavery system was used to build the United States of America, and how the consequences of this system reverberate in American society to this day.
• "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" by Frederick Douglass: a speech by former slave turned abolitionist activist Frederick Douglass
• "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates: an article (with audio reading) that explores the systemic ripple effect of slavery on contemporary Black American life
• "Attempts to Justify Slavery": a BBC guide on the arguments used by white Americans to justify the enslavement of Black Africans and Americans
• "Underground Railroad": a History.com guide on the history and important figures of the Underground Railroad
• Some literary works that explore American slavery are Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines.

2. What literary elements identify a novel as “historical fiction”?

Teaching Suggestion: Use this question to set up students’ understanding of how authors of historical fiction look to major historical events or people to tell their readers stories of the past as a lens of understanding the present. Discuss how both the events and the characters may be a mixture of historical elements and fictional elements. Historical fiction has a variety of sub-genres and can intermingle with other genres, such as psychological fiction, magical realism, bildungsroman, and literary fiction. Novels such as Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles are some examples of the genre that can be described to help illustrate how historical fiction breathes a new life into stories from the past to humanize, empower, and teach on the human condition.

• "Why Are We Living in a Golden Age of Historical Fiction?" by Megan O’Grady: an article from The New York Times that explores the popular interest and powerful purpose in historical fiction
• "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: a viral TED Talk that advocates for the uses of literature to expose often-ignored or marginalized voices and stories of the past and present

Short Activity

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad uses the historical system of the Underground Railroad as a literal plot device and a metaphor. What events, systems, or moments in history can be understood as both literal and metaphorical?

Teaching Suggestion: Students can work in pairs to create a collage on Google Slides with images and slogans that identify the layers of a society-changing event. Students can present their Slides to the class, describing how this event was meaningful to changes in society and how the event can also be metaphorical. For example, the Holocaust ended up re-bordering nations and developing a model for the future United Nations (literal), but it also forced people to think about what it means to be a human being (metaphorical).Encourage students to think about events that were crucial in changing societies or cultures. Ask students what they are learning about in their social studies classes to help them make cross-disciplinary connections.

• "The Most Influential Political Cartoons of All Time": a collection of political cartoons and the historical moments they portrayed; a helpful resource in showing students how to visualize, symbolize, and analyze history through metaphor
• "The Art of the Metaphor" by Jane Hirshfield: a TED-Ed video that uses metaphors to explain what a metaphor is and why it is an important literary device