The American

Learners who have a grasp on the events of the Revolutionary war view clips from five different films as secondary sources. They take notes on each clip thinking about historic inaccuracies. They then view parts of the film The Patriot...

The Great Gatsby, The Jungle and study HRC's Teaching the American Twenties-The Dream Factory are the focus of this instructional activity, Your learners will rewrite a small scene from the novel into a dramatic film scene and then...

Warning or prediction? Nineteen Eighty Four is the anchor text for a series of tasks that ask readers to compare the novel to the film as well as current events to those pictured in George Orwell's dystopian classic.

James Joyce was not the first writer to use stream of consciousness, but the sensory experience in such novels as Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was revolutionary in the literary world. Learn more...

American dream or American nightmare? The Great Gatsby comes under scrutiny in a Crash Course on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story of the Jazz Age, its glitter and its ash heaps. The narrator’s focus in Part I of the two-part series, are...

Sometimes the book is better than the movie; other times, the movie comes out on top. A video discusses the topic of novels and their film adaptations, pointing out specific texts and how the tale translated to the big screen. The...

Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their eyes Were Watching God has been highly praised and severely criticized for its depiction of African American folk culture. A set of primary source materials, including photographs, articles, essays, and...

Author, filmmaker, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was also a dialectologist. The dialogue of the characters in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God reveals her fascination with accents and dialects. A short video from the Great...

How are stories part of our collective culture and memory? Explore the role of the oral tradition for Native American tribes like the Kiowa and how writers like N. Scott Momaday has managed to transfer the oral tradition to the page...

A top vote-getter for the Great American Read program is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Find out why the classic tale, adapted into over 50 films and numerous TV shows, has earned its spot on the favorites list.