In this lesson, students organize photographs in order to tell the story of the Holocaust and construct an evidentiary narrative that makes sense to them. The lesson does not include any “correct” ordering or organization of the photographs and instead encourages students to experiment with organizing them both chronologically and thematically.

This lesson also guides students through the process of revising conclusions based on the discovery of additional historical evidence. Students are given a definition of the Holocaust and asked to consider or revise the definition with each new photograph in order to illustrate how historical narratives change depending on the available evidence.

Reading and analyzing primary texts can often be a daunting task for students who struggle with basic literacy skills. However, because this lesson presents historical data in the form of photographs, it is an excellent way to provide all students with access to the historical process, and to support historical thinking with struggling readers or English language learners.

For more advanced or older students, the supplementary activity asks students to read and incorporate brief testimonies of survivors into their definition of the Holocaust.

This lesson, part of the HERB collection at the American Social History Project, allows students to examine a series of primary source documents related to the Iran-Contra Affair and discuss the central issues surrounding these events. In addition to great background information for the teacher, there is a useful timeline and graphic organizer that help students access the content.

One of the strongest components of this lesson is the unique documents it uses. In addition to a document entitled “The C.I.A. Advises Nicaraguans How to Sabotage the Sandinista Government,” there are handwritten diary entries by Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger and internal communications within the CIA . With the aid of the document analysis form, students discover the differences between internal official documents and personal accounts thus allowing them to see how audience and purpose affect a document’s contents. This document analysis form also asks students to consider what each document reveals about the unfolding of the Iran-Contra Affair and U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Given that the creators have identified the approximate reading difficulty of each document, teachers can use this information to purposefully group students.

This is already a flexible lesson and we suggest teachers consider adding a summative assessment task that requires student writing. As is, the lesson includes a final discussion and guiding questions but no student product requiring that individual students show their understanding. This lesson could also serve as a great scaffold for a document-based essay on motivating factors in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.

Four separate lessons make up this unit on “The Road to Pearl Harbor.” Like most lesson plans from EDSITEment—a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities—this unit is full of rich primary source material and a wide variety of related classroom activities. The unit is guided by four questions, designed to help students understand the long run-up to military conflict between the U.S. and Japan. Reflecting those questions, the unit is divided into four lessons: exploring the growth of U.S./Japanese hostility during World War I and after, looking at American foreign policy during the Sino-Japanese Conflict in the 1930s, examining the Japanese “Southern Advance” of 1940 and 1941, and finally, highlighting the failures of diplomacy that ultimately led to war. The unit does an excellent job of representing historical contingency—revealing how the bombing of Pearl Harbor was actually the product of decades of history. Further, it will help students understand the multiple causes of Japanese aggression—from Japanese imperial ambition to U.S. foreign policies. Each lesson comes with a brief but complete historical background essay embedded with hyperlinks to primary sources, clear and concise suggestions for student activities, worksheets, and ideas for formal and informal assessment. And the interactive timeline tool is an excellent resource that pairs nicely with other aspects of the lessons. There are some things to watch out for, though. Many of the primary sources are long and will need to be carefully selected or vigorously edited, depending on your students’ reading level and persistence. The assessments are only roughly outlined, meaning that teachers will need to fill in the details and establish their own grading criteria. Additionally, while lessons range in length from 1–2 class periods to 3–4 class periods, they collectively require fairly extensive class time—roughly two weeks; consequently, they will most likely need to be used selectively. However, this unit is still an excellent resource. By picking and choosing from among the activities, carefully selecting documents, and further developing one or two assessments, teachers can adapt the lesson to their particular needs.

In this lesson from HERB—a website produced by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning—students learn how to examine posters as primary sources and work with them to write essays. In addition to a collection of wartime propaganda posters, the site includes a brief essay providing historical context, as well as a well-designed “propaganda poster analysis worksheet” that students can use to explore the meaning of each document.

After work in small groups that includes each student analyzing a poster, students demonstrate their understanding through different kinds of writing assignments. These range from considering the historical time and events the poster sits within, to comparing two posters, to fiction writing.

The strength of this lesson is the collection of documents it brings together. Posters from the United States, Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union give students insight into the propaganda machines operating in each country during the Second World War. Because each document is visual in nature, it is a good lesson for struggling readers and English Language Learners. The group structure is also a strength as students have the opportunity to analyze a single poster, but also to look for patterns across several posters.

The HERB website can be navigated several different ways: by collection, by historical era, or by approximately 70 different teaching activities.