Energy for Keeps
The Energy Times
Extra! Extra! Read all about past and present energy use in a classroom-made historical newspaper. Useful as a cross-curricular assignment between science, history, and language arts, the project is sure to get young journalists...
News Literacy Project
Democracy’s Watchdog
As part of a study of the importance of the First Amendment, expert groups research different historic case studies of investigative reporting, and then the experts share their findings with jigsaw groups. The case studies include Nellie...
English Enhanced Scope and Sequence
Media Literacy Applied
After investigating various forms of print, oral, and electronic media as sources of information, class members research a historical figure and produce a résumé for this person. While templates are provided for an initial sorting...
PBS
African American History: Lunch Counter Closed
Young historians investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies the Civil Rights Movement used to end segregation in the United States. After watching an video interview with Carl Matthews and Bill Stevens who participated...
Ford's Theatre
How Perspective Shapes Understanding of History
The Boston Massacre may be an iconic event in American history, but perhaps the British soldiers had another point of view. Using primary sources, including reports from Boston newspapers and secondary sources from the British...
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Fred Seibel, the Times-Dispatch, and Massive Resistance
A lesson challenges scholars to analyze editorial cartoons created by Fred Seibel, illustrator for the Times-Dispatch, during the Massive Resistance. A class discussion looking at today's editorial pages and Jim Crow Laws leads the...
Smithsonian Institution
Art to Zoo: Life in the Promised Land: African-American Migrants in Northern Cities, 1916-1940
This is a fantastic resource designed for learners to envision what it was like for the three million African-Americans who migrated to urban industrial centers of the northern United States between 1910 and 1940. After reading a...
University of Southern California
Deconstructing Genocide: The Ultimate Crime Against Humanity
There are eight stages of an atrocity known as genocide, and it's important to understand how they are represented so we can fight against it in the future. As young historians watch video clips of ten Jewish Holocaust survivors'...
National Endowment for the Humanities
Chronicling America: Uncovering a World at War
As part of a study of World War I, class members read newspaper articles from the time that urge American involvement, non-involvement, or neutrality. Using the provided worksheet, groups analyze the articles noting the central argument...
University of Arkansas
Our Responsibilities
The fourth in a five-lesson unit examining human rights and personal responsibility asks class groups to investigate a current rights issue, and using the provided graphic organizer, summarize the issue, consider which rights are being...
Historical Thinking Matters
Spanish-American War: 1 Day Lesson
After analyzing newspaper articles portraying different perspectives of the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine, your young historians will take a stand on which position is the most believable in both discussion and writing.
Stanford University
Beyond Vietnam
On April 4, 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech "Beyond Vietnam." The controversy that followed is the focus of a three-lesson plan unit that asks class members to consider the political and social implications of King's...
PBS
Who Knows Best
Finding an expert in a given field when conducting research can be a challenge. This guide provides step-by-step directions as well as links to resources that help young sleuths find the authorities and experts they need. As a bonus, two...
Museum of Tolerance
Influence of Media
We are bombarded with media images expressly designed to influence viewers. Learning how to analyze the intended effects of these images is essential and the focus of an activity that asks viewers to use the provided questions to guide...
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation
Tea Overboard
While less well known than the event in Boston, the Yorktown Tea Party was equally decisive in turning community sentiment against Great Britain. To gain an understanding of why the colonists objected to the Tea Act, young historians...