Every year I have students who go: "(groan)(whine) ugh, why do have to even learn social studies?" Each time, I would promptly give each of them an answer to this common question. After a few years of teaching, I sometimes get tired of...

Educators share their tips and tricks for successfully using media in their social studies classes when teaching civics.

Civic Duties and Responsibilities explains how citizenship includes obligations by describing examples of how citizens exercise civic responsibility.

“Civic Virtue and Democratic Principle” defines the terms civic virtue and democratic principles and discusses examples of each in terms of community and the classroom.

For the past 7 years, Trumbull High School's We The People: The Citizen and the Constitution Program, under the leadership of Social Studies Teacher Katie Boland, has won the We The People state championship...

While politics is generally seen as the domain of a civics class (and Craig did a great job of teaching US Government & Politics elsewhere on this channel!) it’s something that sociology is interested in too. Today we’re looking at the...

Jessica Lander is a teacher, author, and advocate. In 2021, Jessica was a Top 50 Finalist, Global Teacher Prize, Varkey Foundation. The finalists were chosen from more than 8000 nominations from 121 countries around the world. She...

In the 1950s, as part of a campaign to expose suspected Communists, thousands of individuals were aggressively investigated and questioned before government panels. Named after its most notorious practitioner, the phenomenon known as...

2,300 years ago, the rulers of Alexandria set out to fulfill a very audacious goal: to collect all the knowledge in the world under one roof. In its prime, the Library of Alexandria housed an unprecedented number of scrolls and attracted...

In the United States today, juries decide less than 4% of criminal cases and less than 1% of civil cases filed in court. At the same time, jury systems in other countries are growing. So what happened in the US? And could the...

If you ask people whether they think stealing is wrong, most of them would answer yes. And yet, in 2013, organizations all over the world lost an estimated total of $3.7 trillion to fraud. Kelly Richmond Pope explains how the fraud...

Before the sun never set on the British Empire; before Genghis Khan swept the steppe; before Rome extended its influence to encircle the Mediterranean Sea; there was ancient Assyria. Considered by historians to be the first true empire,...

While we might consider elections to be the cornerstone of democracy, the Athenians who coined the term actually employed a lottery system to choose most of their politicians. Melissa Schwartzberg describes the ins and outs of the...

The basic idea of human rights is that each one of us, no matter who we are or where we are born, is entitled to the same basic rights and freedoms. That may sound straightforward enough, but it gets incredibly complicated as soon as...

Water is refreshing, hydrating, and invaluable to your survival. But clean water remains a precious and often scarce commodity - there are nearly 800 million people who still don't have regular access to it. Why is that? And how can you...

On August 13, 1961, construction workers began tearing up streets and erecting barriers in Berlin. This night marked the beginning of one of history's most infamous dividing lines: the Berlin Wall. Construction continued for a decade as...

Thousands of years in the making, the Olympics began as part of a religious festival honoring the Greek god Zeus in the rural Greek town of Olympia. But how did it become the greatest show of sporting excellence on earth? Armand D'Angour...

Imagine going about your life knowing that, at any given moment, you and everyone you know could be wiped out without warning at the push of a button. This was the reality for millions of people during the forty-five year period after...

Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh during the New Kingdom in Egypt. Twenty years after her death, somebody smashed her statues, took a chisel and attempted to erase the pharaoh's name and image from history. But who did it? And why? Kate...

There are many stories that can be told about World War II, from the tragic to the inspiring. But perhaps one of the most heart-rending experiences was that of the Akune family, divided by the war against each other, and against their...

For most jobs, it's understood that you can be fired _ whether for crime, incompetence, or just poor performance. But what if your job happens to be the most powerful position in the country _ or the world? That's where impeachment comes...

Escaping slavery; risking everything to save her family; leading a military raid; championing the cause of women's suffrage; these are just a handful of the accomplishments of one of America's most courageous heroes. Janell Hobson...

About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence and persecution. The majority have become Internally Displaced Persons, meaning they fled their homes but are still in their own...

On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln legally changed the status of over 3 million people from "slave" to "free." But his emancipation proclamation wasn't a law - it was an executive order. The framers of the American Constitution made...