The Bracero History Archive—a collaborative project of George Mason University, the Smithsonian, Brown University, and the University of Texas, El Paso—is an online collection of resources that documents the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative where millions of Mexicans came to work in American agriculture during the mid-20th century.
I teach Native American history/studies. . . It is difficult finding curriculum and good lessons for these subjects. I would really like to find a good text book but have not been able to. . . [A]ny ideas or suggestions would be helpful. . .
There are several textbook-y resources available that we like. Consider the readers in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Three of these paperback readers address Native American history, including The Cherokee Removal and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Each of the readers begins with an introductory essay that provides an overview narrative of the topic and its historiographical context. Following this essay are selected primary and secondary sources accompanied by orienting background information. Depending on the ages and abilities of your students, these readers can serve as a resource for creating source-based activities and lectures, or for older and more capable students, they can be a kind of textbook. However, be forewarned, if you are working with younger students, you will likely need to further excerpt and prepare many of the provided sources.
For a lengthier survey textbook that is popular and worth investigating, try First Peoples by Colin G. Calloway. Also consider the documentary series, We Shall Remain, a recent entry in the excellent PBS series, The American Experience. You can find teaching activities and full episodes on the series’ companion website. Also see this blog for links related to this series. All of these resources can help you craft lessons that emphasize both the diversity of Native Americans and the fact that they are still with us today—two ideas that challenge many students’ misconceptions about this topic.
I would like to develop an elective for teaching Native American history. I am looking for a class on teaching Native American history. If you could let me know of any classes, books, or other ancillary materials I would appreciate it very much.
The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC offers a variety of resources about American Indian history including workshops for teachers.
For resources you can use with students, see our response to a teacher who asked about classroom resources for teaching a Native American history course.
We also recommend contacting local tribes and organizations directly to see what resources they recommend that you use to learn about their history. Below are some organizations you might consider:
In Connecticut, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a wealth of resources. They offer professional development to teachers as well. The center also offers workshops on how to evaluate books and other materials about Native Americans and have several educational programs for students based on the Connecticut Curriculum framework. The center designs workshops based on teacher interest as well. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a recommended reading list and a research library.
If you will be in Minnesota for the summer you may want to check out the American Indian Policy Center in St. Paul and The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. These organizations offer resources, and can most likely direct you to additional educational resources.
You can search the NHEC site for relevant local museums, websites, and professional development opportunities. If you have not done so already, remember to also check the course offerings at your local colleges.
Since Revolutionary times, political cartoonists in America have used their art to comment on the political and social landscape. While political cartoons in newsprint fade away, political cartoons have found a new home online and in social media. These cartoons often pack their punch with metaphors and subtle humor, which can leave students perplexed when unwrapping their meaning. However, grappling with this confusion through careful analysis can help students become politically savvy citizens.
Whether you are looking for the latest political cartoons or cartoons from the past, a number of useful repositories exist for your use.
One of the best places to find today’s political cartoons comes from the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC). The site features several cartoons daily. In addition, the AAEC along with NIEonline.com maintains Cartoons for the Classroom, which features a weekly downloadable lesson and links to historical political cartoons.
For a weekly collection of cartoons, MSNBC posts the Week in Political Cartoons, which might be a useful way to review the week’s headlines with students.
Of course, you should also check out your local newspaper for political cartoons related to politics in your state or city.
If you are looking for political cartoons from the past be sure to visit the Library of Congress. A simple search of the Library’s online content reveals hundreds of cartoons available for download, many from the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition, the Library of Congress maintains this collection from the famous Herblock. Herb "Herblock" Block was active from 1929 to 2000, and his cartoons provide a liberal perspective on 20th-century political topics.
For Civil War and Reconstruction era cartoons, HarpWeek maintains a historical database of cartoons that appeared in Harper’s Weekly (published from 1857 to 1916). In the “Cartoon of the Day” collection, one can browse cartoons by topics, people, or places. Each cartoon is accompanied by a detailed explanation of its historical context and bibliographic information.
There are countless ways to help students make sense of political cartoons. To start making cartoon analysis routine in your classroom, you may want to download the Library of Congress’s Political Cartoon Analysis Sheet or the National Archive’s Cartoon Analysis Worksheet.
For a more in-depth approach to interpreting political cartoons, "It's No Laughing Matter" a webpage created by the Library of Congress, can help students better understand political cartoons. In addition to resources for teachers, the site has a great interactive lesson that helps students identify techniques used frequently in political cartoons. This unit plan from ReadWriteThink also provides a series of useful high school-level lessons for interpreting political cartoons.
If you find students struggle with analyzing elements of a political cartoon, try narrowing their focus. Have students examine one quadrant of the cartoon at a time and ask them to decipher what is happening. Often political cartoons have a lot of detail that can distract students from the overall message. In this case, a zoom-in inquiry could also help focus student attention. Along the same line, a document camera could be used to focus on specific elements of a cartoon to prevent students from bogging down in the details. It may also be helpful to have a scholar model the interpretation of a political cartoon. Here, historian Mike O’Malley analyzes a Thomas Nast cartoon related to the gold standard.
Have students practice interpreting political cartoons at home by creating a VoiceThread. You can upload a cartoon and have students identify elements of the cartoon with a video marker and add their commentary or questions (see an example).
Why not take students to the top of the new Bloom’s taxonomy and have them create their own political cartoons? With many web tools available, students need not worry about their drawing ability. Teaching History With Technology reviews several sites for creating comics online.
Political cartoons offer a great deal of content, if students are given the right tools to access and analyze it. The many websites now available for finding cartoons and helping make sense of them give us the resources to practice high-order thinking skills with students through interpreting and creating political cartoons. We should, therefore, give students ample opportunity to explore these cartoons in and out of the classroom.
Watch historians analyze political cartoons on the gold standard, the presidential election of 1932, massive resistance, and the My Lai Massacre in Examples of Historical Thinking.
Try Jonathan Burack's guidelines for interpreting political cartoons in Teaching Guides. John Buescher offers more advice in Ask a Historian.
See award-winning teacher Stacy Hoeflich introduce her 4th-grade students to a political cartoon in Teaching in Action.
Test your students' analytical skills with our quizzes on a Thomas Nast cartoon and a cartoon on massive resistance.
Have you seen Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln? With a Rotten Tomatoes critic approval rating of over 90% and audience approval of more than 80%, viewers praised the film for its earnestness and significance, and for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as the president.
But what do historians have to say? How do they approach the film, and how do they assess it? Even if your students haven't seen the film, reading historians' reviews can help them understand the ways of thinking and types of knowledge that historians use to assess historical accuracy, bias, intended audience, and more.
What do historians' reviews focus on? Do they talk about the same things as "normal" critics' reviews? Do all historians share similar opinions about the movie? How do historians structure their reviews? Does each review make an argument?
Take a look at these reviews to get started:
Students not ready for reading these reviews? Ask them where they think the sound in films comes from. The Washington Post reveals that many of the sounds in Lincoln come from historic buildings and artifacts—including one of Abraham Lincoln's pocketwatches.
Was Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter more historically accurate than Lincoln? No, but you could still use it to teach! Check out our blog entry on the film.
Also see our blog entry on the film The Conspirator. How does it portray Mary Surratt, the only woman accused in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln?
The USS Constitution Museum developed All Hands on Deck as a means of introducing K12 educational elements across subjects (math, art, and more) using the history of one of the United States' most renowned military vessels, the USS Constitution.
The website itself is somewhat disorganized. However, there are a plethora of lesson plans embedded within it for students of any grade level.
The available lessons are divided into five sections—preview activities (to determine pre-existing knowledge), the building of early U.S. military frigates, the War of 1812 and the Barbary Wars, 1800s life aboard a warship, and the lasting legacy of the USS Constitution. These sections have subsections, within which you can find individual lessons intended for grades K4, 58, and 912. Alternatively, visiting "How to Use This Online Curriculum" includes a linked list of states. Clicking on any of the available states—IL, MD, WA, SC, TN, MO, TX, NM, CO, MT, and VA—offers a list of the activities available on the website which correlate with state standards. The individual subsections also include recommended field trip sites, films, books, games, music, and more; as well as anecdotes, literature, and other "grab bag" additional items of interest.
The Image Gallery offers a smattering of paintings, illustrations, and photographs of the vessel and its officers. The gallery also contains a single newspaper recruitment ad dating to 1798.
Educators who would prefer a tangible copy of the curriculum can send an electronic request.
Alternatively, you may want to brush up on your USS Constitution history yourself. In that case, the website offers a 19-minute video in which a young girl meets a variety of figures aboard the ship—a captain's wife, a powder monkey, and an African American sailor among them.
One of the great pleasures of my job as a writer for American Girl is getting letters from my young readers. Over the years, I’ve had tens of thousands of letters, every one as unique, sweet, earnest, and quirky as its writer. Very often, my correspondent asks me, “Why do you write about people who lived long ago?” And I write back, “Because I love thinking about what your life or my life would have been like if we had lived in another time, don’t you?” But that answer tells only one reason why I write historical fiction, and why I think it is a good idea to use historical fiction to teach history. There are other reasons, too.
First, I think historical fiction can make history matter—make it irresistible—to young readers. And it is important to make history matter, because reading about the past not only gives children factual information—sort of a mental timeline, for example, so that they know that the Revolutionary War happened before the Civil War—but learning about the past also allows, encourages, and teaches a child to identify with other voices, views, cultures, and times, which is a good life skill. Reading about the past teaches empathy and compassion. It helps a child see the similarities that lie just underneath our differences.
Ah, but how do we capture the children’s interest? How do we pique their curiosity? How do we engage their imaginations? Well, that’s the magic of historical fiction. And that magic is a second reason why I write historical fiction, and why I think it is good to use it in the classroom. I believe that good historical fiction exercises a child’s imagination through a vicarious experience. It leads children to use themselves and their own lives as comparisons to the characters that lived long ago and often, far away, to reflect on their own experience, to ask their families questions. It awakens awareness, perks up perception, sparks conversations. Reading historical fiction can lead a child to ask, ”What’s my voice? What’s my view? Which side should I be on? Is there a right side?“ So really, what we’re trying to do through historical fiction is to help our students realize they are what history is. What they do matters. They had better pay attention. What we’re trying to do is to sort of tickle a moral intelligence, a mindfulness, a sense of responsibility, into being.
Helping children to be empathetic to others and more aware of themselves are two good and worthy reasons to use historical fiction, but to me, there’s a third reason that’s most important of all. I think the best word to describe it is delight. Teachers and writers want to inspire enthusiasm. We want to say to children, “Oh, look! Isn’t that cool? Can you believe how wacky and wild and fascinating the world is? The universe is abundant and it’s all out there waiting for you.” Historical fiction helps us fire up our students and readers because it uses emotion to make the facts matter. It uses emotion to teach gentle life lessons, and to form a ribbon of connection between the child in the classroom and the characters in the story.
Good historical fiction is funny, challenging, amusing, absorbing, scary, sad, and full of—here’s that word again—delight. Historical fiction is inspired by the child and inspires the child in return. It celebrates the child. It respects the child. Good historical fiction meets readers where they are right now, engaged with school, family, and friends, feeling the drives for love and friendship, and feeling the conflict between being a member of society and yet defining one’s self as a unique and independent being. It grows out of the child’s nature, which is energetic, curious, merry, passionate, exuberant, and earnest. So you might say that my readers themselves are another reason why I write historical fiction. And your students are the reason why historical fiction is a sturdy and effective vehicle for teaching history and a gift—a very good gift—to use in the classroom.
Say you're already using historical fiction in the classroom—what about asking your students to write some of their own? High school teacher Ron Gorr has some ideas. Just as students should read historical fiction along with primary and secondary sources, so should students write it drawing on primary and secondary sources. Ask students how they think their fiction (and the fiction they read) reflects the writer as well as her or his historical research. What in the story shows modern ways of thinking? What might people living at the time the stories are set in think if they read them?
This website is the result of a collaboration among Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), the Springfield Armory, and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). The site provides a narrative of Shays’ Rebellion told through images, summaries, and primary sources—a wealth of materials for classroom teachers.
The Shays’ Rebellion website is designed to be navigated through a series of six historic scenes. Framed on either end by a prologue and epilogue, the scenes present the perspectives of key groups involved in the run-up to rebellion, as well as its aftermath. In “A Bloody Encounter,” for instance, the assault by Shays and his men on the Springfield arsenal is represented in pictures. By rolling a cursor over the image, users can learn more about the scene—the great strength of this approach is that information is contextualized and given greater meaning.
One of the most unique features on the site is that each scene is accompanied by the commentary of eyewitnesses and other figures from the time period. With background knowledge acquired from the scene and brief synopses of events, users are well prepared to understand these commentaries—an excellent use of primary sources.
The site can also be navigated by people, by artifacts and documents, or by themes and essays. Exploring it in any of these ways, however, can be a chaotic experience. The site also includes resources for extension activities like songs and music, a timeline, and a series of historic maps.
This website functions as an easy-to-maneuver and reader-friendly website for gathering information about Arkansas and its impact on American history. Entries are divided into two categories: text and media. Both include subdivisions based on alphabetical listings or gallery images (respectively) in addition to category, type, time period, race and ethnicity, and gender. The Media section offers numerous photos, maps, documents, and video and audio resources. Entries include suggested readings, related links, and media galleries, when applicable.
Some of the more useful features of the site includes a calendar describing events in Arkansas’s history on each day, as well as a photo of the day from the Arkansas gallery. An overview entry provides general information about the state for those beginning to conduct research about Arkansas, and a breadcrumb trail at the top of each page helps readers retrace their steps while visiting the site—a feature users will find very helpful.
Educators will also find more than 100 lesson plans marked by The Butler Center—when planning for topics such as the Civil War, Korean War, and who’s who in Arkansas history. Lesson plans are in PDF format.
Teachers and students will enjoy exploring how the Razorback State played a key role in U.S. history. Teachers will also find the lesson plans from the Butler Center a useful resource for classroom instruction.
This PBS documentary provides many useful resources for teaching the long and influential history of Jewish Americans. At the heart of this video production is the struggle between identity and assimilation. While Jews in America often faced struggles integrating into new communities, their story is common to other immigrant groups and at the same time a "quintessentially American story."
The site is divided into six main sections. Educators will be particularly interested in the historical background offered in Jewish Life in America (which is divided into eleven subsections), the 30 video segments from the documentary, four lesson plans in For Educators, and links to online resources for teaching Jewish American history.
One noteworthy section of the site is Share Your Story. By allowing Jewish American viewers to submit recipes, immigration stories, or family traditions, this site provides an interactive platform that could enhance any classroom. Students can investigate, research, and conduct interviews with family or friends of Jewish heritage and submit their investigations online. Teachers will also find that the video segments, textual information, and online submission tool can work well together to compliment thematic units on immigration, ethnic identity, and moments in history specific to the Jewish experience.